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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 11 Sep 2026

Where Shopify refused to rewrite, and where it rewrote three times

One company running two opposite policies in the same decade. On the substrate it can change, Shopify has not migrated since 2014: it funded a JIT inside CRuby, adopted a database driver and upstreamed the ada…

What surprised meShopify could not fit its own language into its own extension platform: Ruvy was archived in January 2026 because its WebAssembly modules exceed the …
32 sources · 9 organisations · 4 postmortems 34 min read
rubymonolithruntimewebassemblyresiliency
Platform & Infrastructure 08 Sep 2026

Changing a platform without stopping it: a decade of Zalando's cluster fleet

Zalando's production cluster configuration has been a public repository since 2017, and it took a change on the day this guide was written. The guide reads a decade out of it: the branch-per-risk-appetite prom…

What surprised meThe decision records argue for three channels and the running pipeline has four, promoted through two standing pull requests that nobody wrote down; …
20 sources · 2 organisations · 2 postmortems 28 min read
kubernetesplatform-engineeringfleet-upgradeadrzalando
Platform & Infrastructure 07 Sep 2026

The half-life of in-house infrastructure: a decade of Uber, read from its own repositories

A decade of one company's platform decisions read from the artefacts nobody edits on purpose: archive banners, last-commit dates, closed-unmerged pull requests and operator-filed incident reports. It gives an …

What surprised meThe Uber-originated software still shipping in 2026 is almost entirely the software Uber gave away, while several systems it kept are dead without sa…
26 sources · 8 organisations · 4 postmortems 33 min read
open-sourcebuild-vs-buydeprecationgovernanceuber
Platform & Infrastructure 06 Sep 2026

The monolith that could not be split: ten years of GitLab architecture, 2016-2026

A decade of one company's architecture, reconstructed entirely from primary artefacts: design documents with status fields, twenty-eight numbered decision records, a rejected/ directory, closed merge requests …

What surprised meThe flagship horizontal-scaling programme, four years and twenty-eight decision records in, was put on hold in its entirety and replaced by one whose…
32 sources · 2 organisations · 7 postmortems 32 min read
monolithshardingpostgresmulti-tenancygitlab
Platform & Infrastructure 04 Sep 2026

When name resolution fails, the record was wrong, not the server

Six published incidents (AWS October 2025, Meta 2021, Slack 2021, Cloudflare 2025, Salesforce 2021, Roblox 2021) plus the build records at Stripe, Kubernetes, musl and Netflix, reconstructed into a reference r…

What surprised meIn five of six major naming outages the query-serving infrastructure stayed healthy; what failed was the automation and change process that decides w…
28 sources · 26 organisations · 6 postmortems 32 min read
dnsservice-discoverycontrol-planecachingttl
Platform & Infrastructure 29 Aug 2026

Keeping one failure from reaching everyone

Slack, Shopify, Salesforce, DoorDash, Amazon EBS and AWS all cut their systems into independent replicas so that one fault hurts some customers rather than all of them, and all of them publish how. This guide …

What surprised meThe 2020 Physalia paper had already identified that cells do not contain deployments and had built a second, orthogonal partition for it, called colo…
28 sources · 22 organisations · 5 postmortems 42 min read
blast-radiuscell-architecturedeploymentavailabilitymulti-tenancy