System Design Aug 2, 2026 10 min read
Distributed Tracing and Context Propagation Explained
Trace backend work across HTTP and message queues with W3C context, safe baggage, meaningful spans, sampling boundaries, and broken-trace tests.
Tag
Distributed Systems
13 articles with this tag. Follow these related notes when you want a narrower study path.
System Design Aug 2, 2026 11 min read
Production Resilience for Backend Systems Explained
Design backend systems that prevent, contain, degrade through, recover from, and verify failures while preserving user objectives and capacity.
System Design Aug 2, 2026 10 min read
Timeouts, Deadlines, and Cancellation Propagation Explained
Design end-to-end request budgets that distinguish hop timeouts, propagated deadlines, cooperative cancellation, and durable side effects under backend overload.
System Design Jul 29, 2026 12 min read
Message Delivery Semantics Explained
Compare at-most-once, at-least-once, and exactly-once messaging by tracing producer, broker, consumer, acknowledgment, and side-effect failures.
System Design Jul 29, 2026 11 min read
Transactional Outbox Pattern Explained
Prevent database and message broker dual-write failures with a transactional outbox, PostgreSQL locking, and Java and Node.js publishers.
System Design Jul 25, 2026 9 min read
CAP Theorem Explained
Learn what consistency, availability, and partition tolerance mean during failures, why pick-two is misleading, and how PACELC improves the model.
System Design Jun 29, 2026 5 min read
Circuit Breaker Pattern Explained
Learn how the circuit breaker pattern protects backend services from cascading failures, with closed, open, and half-open states.
System Design Jun 29, 2026 4 min read
Distributed Locks Explained
Learn what distributed locks are, when backend systems use them, why they are risky, and what safer alternatives to consider.
System Design Jun 29, 2026 5 min read
Eventual Consistency Explained
Learn what eventual consistency means in distributed systems, why stale reads happen, and how backend teams design around them.
System Design Jun 29, 2026 5 min read
Message Queues Explained
Learn how message queues work in backend systems, including producers, consumers, retries, dead-letter queues, ordering, and idempotency.
System Design Jun 29, 2026 5 min read
Retry Patterns Explained
Learn safe backend retry patterns, including exponential backoff, jitter, retry budgets, idempotency, and when not to retry.
API Design Jun 29, 2026 4 min read
Webhooks Explained
Learn how webhooks work in backend systems, including event delivery, signatures, retries, idempotency, and common design mistakes.
API Design Mar 29, 2026 6 min read
Idempotency in APIs Explained
Learn what idempotency means in API design, why retries create duplicate actions, and how idempotency keys protect backend workflows.