Deep Dives
Longer-form technical explorations for the parts of AI engineering where the interesting details live: systems design, evaluation, reliability, and production tradeoffs.
Showing 26 of 26 deep dives
Databases & Storage
6PostgreSQL Trade-Offs Deep Dive
A PE-style PostgreSQL deep dive covering MVCC, WAL, indexes, partitioning, trade-offs, use cases, limitations, fault tolerance, sharding, replication, and production patterns.
Open deep dive →Databases & StorageApache Cassandra Trade-Offs Deep Dive
A PE-style Cassandra deep dive covering masterless architecture, partition modeling, LSM storage, CQL, tunable consistency, fault tolerance, sharding, replication, and production patterns.
Open deep dive →Databases & StorageTime Series Databases Trade-Offs
A PE-style comparison of InfluxDB 3, TimescaleDB, Prometheus, VictoriaMetrics, and ClickHouse across storage design, cardinality, retention, fault tolerance, sharding, replication, operations, and next-generation alternatives.
Open deep dive →Databases & StorageDistributed SQL Trade-Offs
A PE-style comparison of CockroachDB, YugabyteDB, TiDB, Amazon Aurora DSQL, and Google Cloud Spanner across consistency, sharding, replication, fault tolerance, operational limits, and next-generation alternatives.
Open deep dive →Databases & StorageDynamoDB vs Cassandra vs PostgreSQL Trade-Offs
A PE-style comparison of DynamoDB, Cassandra, and PostgreSQL across access patterns, scaling, consistency, replication, operations, and failure modes.
Open deep dive →Databases & StorageDynamoDB Trade-Offs Deep Dive
A PE-style DynamoDB deep dive covering partition keys, GSIs, LSIs, streams, transactions, strong consistency, adaptive capacity, throttling, replication, and production patterns.
Open deep dive →Streaming & Messaging
4Apache Kafka PE-Grade Deep Dive
A PE-grade Apache Kafka deep dive covering core concepts, architecture, execution model, feature usage, trade-offs, fault tolerance, sharding, replication, and next-generation alternatives.
Open deep dive →Streaming & MessagingKafka vs Kinesis vs Pulsar Trade-Offs
A PE-style comparison of Kafka, Amazon Kinesis, and Apache Pulsar across distributed-log architecture, throughput, retention, ordering, sharding, replication, multi-tenancy, and operations.
Open deep dive →Streaming & MessagingPub/Sub Trade-Offs
A PE-style comparison of Amazon SNS, Apache Kafka, Redis Pub/Sub, and SNS plus SQS across durability, replay, fan-out, partitioning, replication, and operations.
Open deep dive →Streaming & MessagingMessage Brokers Trade-Offs
A PE-style head-to-head comparison of SQS, Kafka, RabbitMQ, Redis Pub/Sub, and ActiveMQ across durability, routing, scaling, replication, and operations.
Open deep dive →Data & Analytics
4Apache Flink Deep Dive Trade-Offs
A PE-style deep dive into Apache Flink architecture, execution model, state backends, checkpointing protocol, time and watermark semantics, trade-offs, use cases, limitations, fault tolerance, sharding, replication, and next-generation alternatives.
Open deep dive →Data & AnalyticsData Engines Trade-Offs
A PE-style comparison of Spark, Flink, Hadoop MapReduce, and Storm across batch and streaming trade-offs, use cases, limitations, fault tolerance, partitioning, replication, and next-generation alternatives.
Open deep dive →Data & AnalyticsCloud DW / Lakehouse Trade-Offs
A PE-style comparison of Snowflake, Databricks, Amazon Redshift, and Google BigQuery across warehouse/lakehouse trade-offs, use cases, limits, fault tolerance, sharding, replication, and platform gravity.
Open deep dive →Data & AnalyticsReal-Time OLAP Trade-Offs
A PE-style comparison of ClickHouse and Apache Pinot for user-facing analytics, streaming ingest, upserts, star-tree indexes, sharding, replication, and operational trade-offs.
Open deep dive →Infrastructure
2Kubernetes Trade-Offs Deep Dive
A PE-style Kubernetes deep dive covering architecture, execution model, feature usage, trade-offs, limitations, fault tolerance, sharding, replication, better patterns, and next-generation alternatives.
Open deep dive →InfrastructureContainer Orchestrators Trade-Offs
A PE-style comparison of Kubernetes, Amazon ECS, HashiCorp Nomad, K3s, and MicroK8s across orchestration trade-offs, use cases, limitations, fault tolerance, sharding, replication, usage patterns, and next-generation alternatives.
Open deep dive →Protocols & Networking
4L7 Proxies / Load Balancers / API Gateways Trade-Offs
A PE-style comparison of Nginx, HAProxy, Envoy, Pingora, and Kong across proxy trade-offs, use cases, limitations, fault tolerance, horizontal scaling, config replication, usage patterns, and next-generation alternatives.
Open deep dive →Protocols & NetworkingNetwork Protocols Trade-Offs
A PE-style layered analysis of TCP, UDP, TLS, HTTP, REST, gRPC, GraphQL, WebSocket, SSE, and WebRTC trade-offs.
Open deep dive →Protocols & NetworkingSSE Protocol Trade-Offs Deep Dive
A PE-style Server-Sent Events deep dive covering EventSource, text/event-stream, reconnects, Last-Event-ID, heartbeats, proxy buffering, HTTP/2 limits, and production patterns.
Open deep dive →Protocols & NetworkingCommunication Protocols Trade-Offs
A PE-style trade-off analysis of REST, polling, webhooks, SSE, WebSockets, gRPC, and WebRTC.
Open deep dive →Identity & Security
3Identity Platforms Trade-Offs
A PE-style comparison of centralized IdP architecture, Auth0, Keycloak, Okta, and AWS Cognito across lock-in, cost, multi-tenancy, fault tolerance, sharding, replication, operations, and next-generation alternatives.
Open deep dive →Identity & SecurityModern Authentication Trade-Offs
A PE-style comparison of MFA, FIDO2/WebAuthn, passkeys, biometrics, and behavioral AI across phishing resistance, recovery, credential distribution, portability, fault tolerance, operations, and next-generation alternatives.
Open deep dive →Identity & SecurityIdentity & Authorization Protocols Trade-Offs
A PE-style trade-off analysis of OAuth 2.0/2.1, OpenID Connect, JWT, SSO, and SAML 2.0 across delegation, identity semantics, fault tolerance, token distribution, federation topology, better usage patterns, and next-generation alternatives including GNAP, DPoP, FedCM, and OIDC4VC.
Open deep dive →Caching & Performance
2Caching Stack Trade-Offs
A PE-style comparison of Redis, Memcached, Valkey, KeyDB, CloudFront, Cloudflare, Fastly, Varnish, and NGINX across cache layers, trade-offs, limitations, fault tolerance, sharding, replication, and production patterns.
Open deep dive →Caching & PerformanceRedis Features Trade-Offs
A PE-style Redis feature guide covering Streams, Pub/Sub, queues, counters, sorted sets, transactions, Lua, probabilistic structures, caching, sharding, replication, and next-generation alternatives.
Open deep dive →