Designing Idempotent APIs: From 'Best Effort' to Reliable User Actions
How to design idempotent APIs so users never get double-charged, double-booked, or double-notified, even when clients retry like crazy.
Category: System Design
17 posts found
Consumer-Driven Contract Testing: Keeping Microservices Deployable Without Fragile End-to-End Tests
Learn how consumer-driven contract testing helps teams deploy microservices independently without brittle end-to-end tests. Practical guide with Pact examples and CI/CD integration.
Designing Reliable Sagas: A Practical Guide to Distributed Transactions in Microservices
Learn how to design and implement saga patterns for handling long-running, cross-service workflows in microservices. From orchestration vs choreography to idempotency and observability.
Cell-Based Architecture: A Practical Guide to Limiting Blast Radius at Scale
How to split a growing system into cells so a bad deploy or hotspot hurts only a small part of users instead of everyone.
Control Plane vs Data Plane: A Concrete Pattern for Modern Backend Systems
How to split your system into 'think' (control) and 'do' (data) parts so you can move faster without risking your core traffic path.
Designing Backpressure-First Systems: Surviving Traffic Spikes Without Falling Over
How to design web services that slow down gracefully instead of crashing when traffic or downstream latency spikes.
Designing Multi-Tenant SaaS with Strong Isolation by Default
How to design SaaS systems where many tenants share the platform but don't share failure modes, noisy neighbors, or data.
Multi-Region 'Strong Enough' Consistency: Designing Around Reality, Not Theory
Practical patterns for 'strong enough' consistency in multi-region systems: per-entity guarantees, clear SLAs, and simple conflict handling.
Cell-Based Architectures for SaaS: Designing for Blast Radius, Not Just Scale
How to move from one big shared cluster to multiple self-contained cells that limit incident impact and isolate noisy neighbors.
Idempotency by Design: Building 'Exactly-Once' Effects on 'At-Least-Once' Rails
A practical blueprint for building idempotent systems that prevent duplicate payments, orders, and writes in distributed systems.