Hi everyone, First, I’d like to sincerely thank everyone who has supported Highscalability over the years. We’ve grown together through some interesting times. Massive changes have occurred in how systems are built, and my goal has always been to help people learn how to build them better. I’d like to think that goal was accomplished. Obviously, for that last several years, things have been quiet around here. This has always been a one programmer show, and for everything, there is a season. The season for me is changing. That means http://highscalability.com is for sale. My preference is ..read more

This week I’ve been reading through the recent judgment from the Swedish FSA on the Swedbank outage. If you’re unfamiliar with this story, Swedbank had a major outage in April 2022 that was caused by an unapproved change to their IT systems. It temporarily left nearly a million customers with incorrect balances, many of whom were unable to meet payments.  After investigation, the regulator found that Swedbank had not followed their change management process and issued a SEK850M (~85M USD) fine. That’s a lot of money to you and me, but probably didn’t impact their bottom line ver ..read more

You can subscribe to the system design newsletter to excel in system design interviews and software architecture. The original article was published on systemdesign.one website. What Is Gossip Protocol? The typical problems in a distributed system are the following [1], [11]: maintaining the system state (liveness of nodes) communication between nodes The potential solutions to these problems are as follows [1]: centralized state management service peer-to-peer state management service ..read more

  This is a guest article by NK. You can view the original article Consistent hashing explained on systemdesign.one website. How does consistent hashing work? At a high level, consistent hashing performs the following operations: The output of the hash function is placed on a virtual ring structure (known as the hash ring) The hashed IP addresses of the nodes are used to assign a position for the nodes on the hash ring The key of a data object is hashed using the same hash function to find the position of the key on the hash ring The hash ring is traversed in the clockwise directio ..read more

DALL-E picture generated from the answer. I was curious, given all the ChatGPT love, what it would make of some of our favorite topics. I was both impressed and unimpressed. Impressed. ChatGPT instantly generated an response that might make a good answer in a Miss Universe contest. You know, the kind of answer delivered with a radiant smile calculated to offend no one yet still sounds comprehensive and deep. Unimpressed. The answers are a mile wide and an inch deep. There's not a lot of insight. It's more of a zeitgeist oracle. Nothing wrong with that, but I don't think we'll be unemployed s ..read more

Never fear, HighScalability is here!   1958: An engineer wiring an early IBM computer 2021: An engineer wiring an early IBM quantum computer. @enclanglement   My Stuff: I'm proud to announce a completely updated and expanded version of Explain the Cloud Like I'm 10! This version adds 2x more coverage, with special coverage of AWS, Azure, GCP, and K8s. It has 482 mostly 5 star reviews on Amazon. Here's a 100% organic, globally sourced review: Love this Stuff? I need your support on Patreon to keep this stuff going. Number Stuff ..read more

  There's a move to regulate cloud providers by vertically separating the services they offer. Like railroads of yore, who were not allowed to provide freight services on top of their base services, cloud providers would not be allowed to provide services on top of their base platform services. Vertical separation would be new to the cloud industry. Is it a good idea? Would it actually solve any problems? My answers are no and no, but probably not for the reasons you think. Let's dive in. Here are a few useful resources for exploring this argument: Maintaining monopolies with the cloud ..read more

I've been working hard on a completely updated version of Explain the Cloud Like I'm 10 and I'm happy to announce it's ready! You can buy version 2.0 at: https://www.amazon.com/Explain-Cloud-Like-Im-10-ebook/dp/B0765C4SNR.   If you've already bought, Explain the Cloud Like I'm 10, then you should just be able to update to the new version for free. What's new? This version has about 2x the material. I go in-depth on: The major cloud providers and all the different platforms for deploying workloads. How to decide between cloud providers. How to switch to the cloud. How to decide if you sh ..read more

Who's Hiring?  Close is building the sales communication platform of the future and we're looking for a Site Reliability Engineer to help us accomplish that goal. If you have a passion for databases (both SQL and NoSQL), significant experience building, managing, and monitoring infrastructure, databases, and backend services at scale and want to work with a rag-tag team of hardworking, but humble humans, then come check us out! Wynter is looking for system administrators, engineers, and developers to join its research panel. Participate in research surveys, get paid ($90-$180/hr) for y ..read more

Never fear, HighScalability is here! Every cell a universe. Most detailed image of a human cell to date. @microscopicture Other images considered: one byte of RAM in 1946; visual guide on troubleshooting Kubernetes; Cloudflare using lava lamps to generate cryptographic keys; 5MB of data looked like in 1966 My Stuff: Love this Stuff? I need your support on Patreon to help keep this stuff going. Know anyone who needs to go from zero to cloud? My book teaches them all they need to know about the cloud. Explain the Cloud Like I'm 10. It has 440 mostly 5 star reviews on Amazon. Here's a 100% si ..read more