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High Level Design
Technology Deep Dive
Overview
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Technology Deep Dive

In-depth explorations of specific technologies — internals, design choices, performance characteristics, and where they fit.

4 Sub-topics5 Articles
📂 Sub-topics
🗄️CassandraCluster architecture and the ring, tunable consistency, the LSM-tree storage engine, and Discord case studies.7 articles→🔐SSHSSH from first principles — architecture, cryptography, key exchange, authentication, tunneling, and a complete walkthrough.8 modules→🔄Node.js Event LoopA first-principles course on the Node.js event loop — phases, queues, timers, microtasks, libuv, the thread pool, and a master mental model.16 modules→☁️DynamoDBAmazon DynamoDB internals — data model and partitioning, capacity, replication and consistency, the request path, transactions, and the storage engine.9 modules→
📝 Articles
HollowNetflixDistributed Systems

Netflix Hollow — Deep Dive

How Netflix Hollow replicates a read-only, in-memory dataset from one producer to many consumers — snapshots, deltas, reverse deltas, ordinal-based columnar storage, producer/consumer lifecycle, and failure modes.

Jun 21, 2026·35 min read
DynamoAmazonDistributed Systems

Dynamo: Amazon's Highly Available Key-value Store

Amazon's 2007 Dynamo paper — a decentralized, highly available key-value store: consistent hashing, vector clocks, sloppy quorums, hinted handoff, Merkle trees, and gossip-based membership.

Jul 11, 2026·45 min read
NginxArchitectureConcurrency

Nginx Deep Dive

How NGINX serves hundreds of thousands of concurrent connections on modest hardware with a small pool of event-driven worker processes.

Aug 12, 2026·28 min read
S3AWSStorage

How Amazon S3 Works — Durability & Scale

How Amazon S3 reaches 11 nines of durability and serves over 1 PB/s by erasure-coding objects into shards spread across millions of cheap drives.

Aug 9, 2026·17 min read
DynamoDBCase StudyPostmortem

The October 2025 DynamoDB us-east-1 Outage

How a latent race condition in DynamoDB's automated DNS management emptied the us-east-1 endpoint's DNS record and cascaded into a ~14.5-hour AWS outage.

Oct 20, 2025·8 min read