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.

91 field guides 2462 graded sources 422 postmortems 8 categories
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
Distributed Systems 09 Oct 2026

Choosing the backend

Reconstructs the backend-selection stack from Google's SRE book and Prequal paper, Netflix's edge redesign, Twitter's aperture work, Uber's dynamic subsetting, gRPC's design records (including one subsetting p…

What surprised meThe mature implementations agree the balancer's job is not to find the best backend but to bound how much it trusts every signal that claims to know …

30 sources · 18 organisations · 5 postmortems 30 min read
load-balancingp2csubsettingfeedback-loopsenvoy
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
Integration & APIs 08 Oct 2026

When every client reconnects at once

Reconstructs the connection layer from GitLab's public incident tracker (144,000 sessions reset, fleet 100 to 335 pods), the matrix.org thundering-herd postmortem, and the contracts Discord, Netflix, gRPC, XMP…

What surprised meThe operators best at surviving reconnect storms cause disconnects on purpose: Netflix's gateway gives every connection a randomized maximum lifetime…

24 sources · 14 organisations · 4 postmortems 27 min read
websocketsrealtimereconnectbackpressuresession-resumption
Reliability & Operations 07 Oct 2026

Coming back from cold: the restart is a harder load case than the crash

Reconstructs, from the Kubernetes project's own design records, the fixes HashiCorp shipped after October 2021, the Chubby and Physalia papers, Netflix and Meta operational docs, and GitLab's public incident t…

What surprised meThe industry's warm-up machinery states in its own documentation that it assumes something warm is still standing: Envoy's slow start calls itself 'n…

20 sources · 10 organisations · 4 postmortems 26 min read
cold-startthundering-herdbootstrapbackoffcapacity
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
Data Platforms 06 Oct 2026

Correctness, then cost, then neighbours: ten years of TiDB, read from its own design record

PingCAP has published a dated design document or RFC for nearly every substantial change to TiDB and TiKV since 2018, plus a release note for every version since 2017. Read in order, that record shows the bind…

What surprised meThe storage redesign that was meant to take clusters from terabytes to petabytes never appears in a release note after October 2023; what users actua…

26 sources · 5 organisations · 4 postmortems 38 min read
distributed-sqlraftmulti-tenancyschema-changestorage-engines
Distributed Systems 06 Oct 2026

Serving without the control plane

Kubernetes, Envoy, Eureka and Patroni all answer the same question in their repositories: what may the data plane do with its last instructions when the control plane goes silent? This guide reconstructs the f…

What surprised meEnvoy, Kubernetes and Eureka each ship a numeric threshold (50%, 55%, 15%) above which the system stops believing its own health signal, three indepe…

21 sources · 10 organisations · 4 postmortems 27 min read
control-planedata-planestatic-stabilityleasesservice-discovery
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