Systems
91 posts in category “Systems”.
Software-Defined Networking: OpenFlow's Match-Action Tables, the P4 Language, and the Programmable Data Plane Vision
2026-04-15How SDN rewired the ossified internet architecture — from OpenFlow's match-action pipeline to P4's protocol-independent packet processing, and the ONOS/ODL control planes that orchestrate programmable forwarding at scale.
BGP and Internet Routing: The Path-Vector Protocol, AS-Level Topology, Convergence, and the Prefix Hijacking Problem
2026-04-08How BGP glues together 70,000+ autonomous systems into the global internet — the path-vector algorithm, route-flap damping, the convergence time problem, prefix hijacking, and the RPKI/BGPSec defenses that try to fix it.
QUIC and HTTP/3: The UDP-Based Transport Revolution — 0-RTT, Connection Migration, and Stream Multiplexing Without Head-of-Line Blocking
2026-03-06How QUIC rewrites the transport layer rulebook by moving TCP's reliability into userspace on top of UDP — 0-RTT handshakes, connection migration across IP addresses, and solving head-of-line blocking once and for all.
Content Delivery Networks: DNS-Based Routing, Anycast, Edge Caching, and the Economics of CDN Peering
2026-03-04How Akamai, Cloudflare, and Fastly keep the web fast — DNS-based request routing, anycast IPs, consistent hashing at the edge, and the business of CDN peering that makes it all economically viable.
Edge Computing: The Fog/Mist/Cloud Continuum, K3s, and the Computation Offloading Decision
2026-02-16How the edge-cloud continuum reshapes where computation happens — from K3s and MicroK8s for edge-native Kubernetes to 5G MEC, the offloading decision problem, and why latency and bandwidth dictate architecture at the edge.
Geo-Distributed Systems: WAN Latency, Multi-Leader Replication, and the Speed-of-Light Constraint
2026-02-13How the speed of light shapes the architecture of global-scale systems — from multi-leader and leaderless replication to CRDTs, Spanner, CockroachDB, and the fundamental tension between consistency and latency.
P2P Networks: BitTorrent's Incentives, IPFS's Merkle DAGs, and the Decentralized Web Vision
2026-01-18From tit-for-tat choking algorithms to content-addressed Merkle DAGs — how BitTorrent and IPFS engineered the two most successful decentralized protocols in internet history.
Database Internals: Storage Engines, Transactions, and Recovery
2025-12-21A deep technical walkthrough of how databases store data, ensure correctness, and recover from crashes — covering B-trees, LSM-trees, write-ahead logging, MVCC, isolation levels, and replication.
Distributed Hash Tables: Chord, Pastry, Kademlia, and the Structured Overlay Revolution
2025-12-08How consistent hashing, finger tables, prefix-based routing, and the XOR metric turned P2P networks from unscalable floods into efficient, provably correct structured overlays.
Epidemic Protocols: Gossip, HyParView, Plumtree, and the Mathematics of Infection-Style Dissemination
2025-12-08How push, push-pull, and pull gossip propagate information with tunable reliability guarantees — plus HyParView for membership and Plumtree for efficient broadcast in large-scale dynamic networks.
CPU Microarchitecture: Pipelines, Out-of-Order Execution, and Modern Performance
2025-12-04An in-depth exploration of CPU microarchitecture: instruction pipelines, hazards, branch prediction, out-of-order execution, register renaming, superscalar and SIMD units, and how software maps to hardware for performance.
Distributed Snapshots: The Chandy-Lamport Algorithm, Lai-Yang, and the Foundations of Consistent Global State
2025-10-31How do you capture a consistent snapshot of a running distributed system without stopping the world? The Chandy-Lamport algorithm, its non-FIFO extension by Lai and Yang, and the deep connection to checkpointing and deadlock detection.
Distributed Systems: Consensus, Consistency, and Fault Tolerance
2025-10-20Fundamentals of distributed systems: failure models, consensus algorithms (Paxos, Raft), CAP theorem, consistency models, gossip, membership, CRDTs, and practical testing strategies like Jepsen.
Clock Synchronization: Lamport Clocks, Vector Clocks, Hybrid Logical Clocks, and the CRDT Connection
2025-10-08From scalar Lamport clocks that capture causality to vector clocks that characterize it precisely, through hybrid logical clocks that bridge physical and logical time — the intellectual lineage of distributed timekeeping.
Time in Distributed Systems: NTP, PTP, TrueTime, and the Impossibility of Perfect Synchronization
2025-10-01From Marzullo's algorithm in NTP to hardware timestamping in PTP and Google's TrueTime in Spanner — how distributed systems wrestle with the fundamental impossibility of perfectly synchronized clocks.
The Quiet Calculus of Probabilistic Commutativity
2025-09-27A practical calculus for quantifying when non-commutative operations in distributed systems can be safely executed without heavyweight coordination.
Storage-Class Memory: Intel Optane, 3D XPoint, and the Lessons of a Bold Failure
2025-08-15The technology, the programming model, and the performance characteristics of Intel Optane — and why the most promising memory technology in a generation failed commercially despite delivering exactly what it promised.
Differential Privacy: Formal Guarantees, Composition Theorems, and the Engineering of Private Systems
2025-08-12Build differential privacy from first principles: the formal (ε, δ)-definition, the Laplace and Gaussian mechanisms, composition theorems (basic and advanced), the sparse vector technique, and how to engineer practical private data systems at scale.
Memory Technologies: DRAM, HBM, GDDR, and the Scaling Wall
2025-08-10Inside the memory hierarchy that feeds the compute engines — DRAM cell physics, HBM stack architecture, GDDR for graphics, the row hammer crisis, and emerging alternatives like FeRAM and MRAM.
Queueing Theory for Systems Engineers: From M/M/1 to Heavy-Tail Distributions and Tail-at-Scale
2025-07-18Master queueing theory as a practical tool for systems design: the M/M/1 model, Little's Law, Jackson networks, the dramatic impact of heavy-tailed service times on tail latency, and how to apply these insights to load balancers, microservices, and capacity planning.
Memory Consistency Models: From Sequential Consistency to the C++11 Memory Model
2025-06-24A rigorous treatment of memory consistency models: Lamport's sequential consistency, the transition to relaxed models, the formal semantics of the C++11 memory model with its acquire-release and relaxed atomics, and how to reason about concurrent code that doesn't tear.
ASIC Design Flow: From RTL to GDSII — Synthesis, STA, and the Tapeout Checklist
2025-06-22A walk through the entire ASIC design flow — logic synthesis with Design Compiler, static timing analysis with PrimeTime, place-and-route with Innovus/ICC2, clock tree synthesis, and the signoff checklist that separates working silicon from a very expensive coaster.
Error-Correcting Codes: Reed-Solomon, LDPC, and How Distributed Storage Survives Failure
2025-05-18Build error-correcting codes from the ground up: finite field arithmetic, Reed-Solomon encoding and decoding via Lagrange interpolation, LDPC codes and belief propagation, and how modern distributed storage systems use erasure coding to survive disk failures with minimal overhead.
FPGA Programming: HLS, Verilog, and the Spatial Computing Paradigm
2025-05-12How reconfigurable hardware rewires the boundary between software and silicon — from Verilog's explicit dataflow to high-level synthesis with C++, and why FPGAs are eating the inference and networking world.