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Zalando

What the engineers at Zalando write about, ranked by depth and by what readers find useful.

Writes aboutMachine Learning (1)Microservices (1)Observability (1)PostgreSQL (1)Reliability (1)

  1. 01Zalando · architecture

    Automating Data Ingestion with a RAG Flywheel

    Zalando replaced manual schema mapping for diverse supplier data with an LLM-powered Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) flywheel. The system combines Amazon Titan embeddings stored in PostgreSQL via pgvector with tool-constrained generative models running at zero temperature. Every LLM suggestion passes through strict API validation checks before being reviewed by operations specialists, creating a continuous learning loop that improves future predictions.

    DEPTH ■■■■■14 min read2 weeks ago

    Machine LearningPostgreSQL

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  2. 02Zalando · postmortem

    Thundering herd of circuit breakers

    An engineering team investigated why a client-side circuit breaker repeatedly failed to close on its own after an outage. By exporting OpenTelemetry traces into a custom visualization tool, they discovered that low probe traffic caused the autoscaler to scale down the service to minimum capacity, triggering a thundering herd of requests and immediate timeouts the moment the circuit breaker closed. Adjusting the system to account for capacity and probe representativeness prevents this oscillation.

    DEPTH ■■■■■10 min read2 weeks ago

    MicroservicesObservabilityReliability

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