Easy Learn
A complete beginner-to-production guide to the cache-aside (lazy loading) pattern: what it is, its history from CPU hardware caches in the 1980s through Facebook popularizing Memcached-in-front-of-MySQL in the 2000s, the problem of database bottlenecks and hot-key traffic, core vocabulary (cache, hit, miss, TTL, invalidation, key-value store, LRU with hashmap +…
A complete, plain-language guide to authentication vs. authorization: what each term really means, a short history from CTSS passwords through Kerberos, LDAP, SAML, OAuth and OpenID Connect, why the two are so easily confused (including 401 vs 403), authentication factors and MFA, the four authorization models (ACL, RBAC, ABAC, ReBAC),…
A complete beginner-to-production guide to cache eviction: what it is, its 1960s hardware-cache origins with Maurice Wilkes and the memory wall, the problem of finite fast memory, core vocabulary (hit, miss, capacity, eviction, policy, TTL, invalidation, working set, hit ratio), cache architecture and components, all major eviction algorithms with Java…
A complete, beginner-friendly guide to cloud capacity planning: what it really means, a short history from the Erlang formula to the cloud era, why we plan even with elasticity, the two failure modes (under- and over-provisioning), core vocabulary, predictive vs reactive scaling, architecture and components, how scaling decisions actually get…
A beginner-friendly, deep-dive walkthrough of Content Delivery Networks and the role they play in modern infrastructure: what a CDN really is, a short history from Akamai in 1998 to the edge-computing era, the problem CDNs solve (distance, single-server limits, unpredictable middle mile), core concepts and vocabulary (origin, edge, PoP, cache…
A complete, beginner-friendly walkthrough of what “the cloud” actually is, how it works under the hood, why it took over modern computing, and how the engineers at Netflix, Amazon, and Uber use it every single day. Opens with the taxi-versus-car and public-utility-versus-backyard-generator analogies to explain that cloud computing means using…
A beginner-friendly, architect-focused deep dive into why cloud cost management moved out of the finance department and onto the design whiteboard. Opens with the rental-car analogy that motivates the whole shift, then traces the full history of how compute became a metered utility: the launch of AWS EC2 in 2006,…
A complete beginner-to-production guide to API gateway rate limiting: what it is, its history from 1980s telco traffic shaping to modern cloud gateways, the four core algorithms (fixed window, sliding window, token bucket, leaky bucket) with full Java reference implementations, the request lifecycle through gateway and Redis counter store, the…
A complete, beginner-friendly walkthrough of one of the most repeated questions in system design: why the world’s largest, busiest, most important computer systems almost always choose to grow sideways — adding more ordinary machines — rather than upward, by piling ever-more power onto one extraordinary machine. Opens with a neighbourhood…
A beginner-friendly, cross-disciplinary deep dive into why experienced software architects lean so heavily on design patterns. Opens with the “big blocks at the bottom” and shared-recipe analogies that motivate the whole idea, then traces the story of design patterns from Christopher Alexander’s 1977 book A Pattern Language on building architecture,…