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Digs

Searching X architecture returns material written to be found by that query, which means tutorials and vendor pages. The material worth having was written by an engineer explaining a real system to their peers, and it uses different words. A dig is what comes back from going after that layer on one topic: the architecture reconstructed across real systems, the decisions and the conditions that flip them, what actually broke, and numbers you can plan against. Every claim is graded, linked and dated.

90 field guides 2433 graded sources 419 postmortems 8 categories
All AI & LLM Systems8 Data Platforms12 Distributed Systems10 Platform & Infrastructure24 Integration & APIs11 Security & Identity8 Reliability & Operations11 Cost & Efficiency6

Compute, orchestration, networking, developer platforms, build and release.

Platform & Infrastructure 13 Oct 2026

When one platform runs everything: eleven years of Monzo's architecture

A single-company dig, reconstructed from Monzo's own incident reports and engineering posts, its conference talks, and the archive banners and commit dates in its public repositories. It gives an architect the…

What surprised meThe published justification for a second platform on a second cloud is not that clouds fail: Monzo states that a bug in its own code or processes is …
31 sources · 19 organisations · 3 postmortems 44 min read
monzomicroserviceskubernetesresiliencemulticloud
Platform & Infrastructure 09 Oct 2026

Changing what the services stand on: ten years of ByteDance, read from its own repositories

An organisation past a certain size cannot ask its services to change, so when the layer beneath them becomes the constraint it replaces that layer and keeps the signature. This guide reconstructs every one of…

What surprised meThe gravity reversed in one half of the stack and froze in the other: Go's own runtime source now names these packages as a compatibility constraint …
24 sources · 7 organisations · 5 postmortems 40 min read
golangkubernetesforkscompatibilityplatform-engineering
Platform & Infrastructure 08 Oct 2026

Hardening the wrong plane: ten years of Cloudflare's architecture

A single-company dig: Cloudflare, 2016 to 2026, reconstructed from eight of its own incident reports, its engineering accounts of Pingora, Quicksilver, Workers and the Rust rewrite of its core proxy, and the l…

What surprised meThe same oversized feature file hit both proxy generations on 18 November 2025 and the newer, memory-safe Rust one failed worse: FL2 returned 5xx whe…
30 sources · 12 organisations · 9 postmortems 40 min read
cloudflareconfigurationproxyblast-radiusrollout
Platform & Infrastructure 07 Oct 2026

Replacing the package with the image: ten years of Red Hat changing the unit of change

Four generations of one host operating system, reconstructed from the artefacts the decisions were taken in: Fedora CoreOS design records and tracker issues, OpenShift enhancement proposals with their rejected…

What surprised meThe container registry was not an idea Red Hat lacked in 2018: it was considered in tracker issue #23, declined as the default on the stated ground t…
30 sources · 10 organisations · 4 postmortems 36 min read
immutable-infrastructureostreebootcopenshiftfleet-updates
Platform & Infrastructure 05 Oct 2026

Everything they deleted was on the inside: ten years of HashiCorp, read from its own repositories

HashiCorp spent a decade deleting things from the inside of its products: a Raft log store, a dependency cluster, a process on every node, four products. In the same decade it could not move its plugin protoco…

What surprised meOpenTofu's copy of the plugin protocol documentation still dates protocol 5.0 to "OpenTofu v0.12", a release that never existed: a fork created over …
24 sources · 5 organisations · 1 postmortem 32 min read
hashicorpterraformconsulvaultraft
Platform & Infrastructure 04 Oct 2026

Keeping the main branch green: thirteen years of merge queues, read from the repositories that ran them

The merge-queue pattern traced through its primary record: Rust's three generations of bors, Zuul's speculative gating, Kubernetes' Tide, GitLab's trains, Chromium's CQ and GitHub's built-in queue, plus two co…

What surprised meAfter GitHub absorbed the merge queue into the platform and Bors-NG deprecated itself in response, the project that invented the pattern rebuilt its …
20 sources · 11 organisations · 2 postmortems 28 min read
merge-queueci-cdbuild-releaseborsspeculative-execution
Platform & Infrastructure 04 Oct 2026

Replacing the engine room in public: ten years of Sentry, read from its RFCs, releases and self-host floor

A decade of component replacement inside one product, measured in the artefact other people install: seven containers at the 9.1.2 tag, thirty by the end of 2020, fifty-one on master, and an enforced memory fl…

What surprised meThe free self-hosted edition is not downstream of the architecture but a veto on it: RFC 0072 rejected a Kafka schema registry service partly because…
32 sources · 3 organisations · 5 postmortems 32 min read
migrationkafkaclickhouserustopen-core
Platform & Infrastructure 03 Oct 2026

Scaling without splitting: a decade of Shopify, read from the code it published

A decade of one company's architecture, reconstructed from the ring of repositories around a closed monolith: a boundary checker whose stricter half was removed, a resilience library that sizes bulkheads from …

What surprised meThe company that chose static analysis over service boundaries then deleted half of its own boundary model: packwerk shipped with dependency and visi…
26 sources · 8 organisations · 4 postmortems 30 min read
monolithmodular-monolithshardingresilienceruby
Platform & Infrastructure 01 Oct 2026

Two hundred control planes per cluster: ten years of SAP's Gardener

A fleet platform has to give hundreds of teams their own cluster, on whichever infrastructure each product sells on, cheaply enough that asking for one is not a budget conversation. Gardener is the rare case w…

What surprised meThe parts of the platform that survived a decade are the ones with a one-to-one Kubernetes analogue, and the two mechanisms deleted without ever reac…
34 sources · 4 organisations · 3 postmortems 36 min read
kubernetesmulti-tenancycontrol-planesapplatform-engineering