Distributed Systems
Deep dives into authentication patterns, security boundaries, distributed rate limiting, event streaming, and production-grade implementation strategies.
Featured Articles
Authentication questions every microservices team eventually faces. Explore validation patterns, trust models, gateway strategies, and production architectures for distributed systems.
Why JWT validation is only the beginning, and how small security decisions become expensive architectural problems at scale.
When correct rate limiting becomes incorrect architecture. Learn how shared state, Redis, and layered edge protection solve the hardest distributed systems problems at scale.
How we kept PostgreSQL synchronized with OpenSearch using Kafka Connect, with reconciliation to ensure business confidence in the data.
Microservices introduce distributed boundaries, which means decisions about identity, communication, state, and failure must be deliberate. Teams need to define what a gateway validates, what each service is responsible for, how traffic is limited under load, and how updates reach downstream search or analytics systems. Splitting a system into services without clear domain boundaries and operational ownership can add latency and complexity without improving delivery.
This collection focuses on those practical concerns: JWT trust boundaries, authentication debt, distributed rate limiting, and event-driven synchronization with Kafka Connect and OpenSearch. Each article describes implementation choices and tradeoffs that can help teams assess reliability, security, and operational effort. For related Java and Spring examples, visit the backend engineering collection.