Read what ships.

01Cloudflare · architecture

Origin Range Requests: Serving large files without range-request tuning

Cloudflare replaced a legacy, fixed-size range caching design that suffered from bandwidth waste and memory pressure with a Pingora-based chunk coordinator. The new implementation dynamically combines cached chunks and aligned origin fetches to serve range requests accurately without manual tuning. This approach cut p99 time to first byte in half for R2 storage and reduced tiered cache traffic by six percent.

DEPTH ■■■■■8 min read2 days ago

DatabasesPerformanceRedis

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02PlanetScale · architecture

Shard design doesn't start from your tables

Designing a sharded Postgres architecture requires grouping tables around shared query keys rather than starting from table structures alone. The post details how to configure shard groups, reference tables, SQL expressions in shard indexes, and global secondary indexes using Neki. This setup enables efficient single-shard queries and transactions while maintaining full Postgres semantics.

DEPTH ■■■■■8 min read2 days ago

PostgreSQL

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03ByteByteGo · migration

Why Shopify Migrated From React Native

Shopify migrated its mobile applications from React Native to native Swift and Kotlin because AI coding agents made the cost of duplicating features across platforms negligible. Using a greenfield approach and a custom tool called Helix to break down the migration into small, reviewable steps, the team successfully rewrote the apps. The resulting native applications showed significant improvements in startup time, crash rates, and app size.

DEPTH ■■■■■11 min read5 days ago

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04Cloudflare · architecture

Bringing post-quantum cryptography to geographically fenced key management

Cloudflare introduced a post-quantum geographically restricted key manager in closed beta to enforce data sovereignty and protect customers against harvest-now-decrypt-later attacks. The team implemented a hybrid ML-KEM-768 and X25519 cryptographic design that separates globally distributed wrapped private keys from regionally restricted root keys. This ensures that decryption keys are only accessible within authorized geographical boundaries and fails closed if validation fails.

DEPTH ■■■■■12 min read2 days ago

Security

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05PlanetScale · practice

I don't trust ON DELETE CASCADE

Postgres ON DELETE CASCADE can cause production outages, replication failures, and performance degradation during large deletions or schema migrations due to long-running transactions holding locks and generating massive WAL. The author recommends using soft deletes with batched background cleanup instead to keep transactions short and bounded. This approach avoids table locks and simplifies data recovery.

DEPTH ■■■■■5 min read4 days ago

PostgreSQL

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06ByteByteGo · architecture

How Uber Built a Genie to Answer Questions Correctly

Uber built an internal AI assistant called Genie to answer engineering support questions directly within Slack. The system uses a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) architecture powered by Apache Spark, LangChain, and vector databases to fetch and explain documentation. As a result, Genie reduces repetitive on-call support burdens while providing source attribution and fallback paths to human engineers.

DEPTH ■■■■■13 min read6 days ago

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07Cloudflare · performance

Cutting our inference bill by 68% by being obsessive about optimization

An engineering team investigated a steady rise in AI code review costs and found that cache misses and redundant model calls were driving up expenses. By restructuring system prompts to enable cross-repository prompt caching, eliminating wasted tool calls, and switching to more efficient models, the team cut inference costs by 68% while also significantly improving review latency.

DEPTH ■■■■■15 min read6 days ago

Machine Learning

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08PlanetScale · architecture

What gets TOASTed in Postgres

This post examines how PostgreSQL uses TOAST to manage oversized rows and variable-length columns through compression and off-row storage. It compares the pglz and LZ4 compression algorithms across different workloads, highlighting trade-offs in search windows, file sizes, and CPU overhead. The analysis demonstrates how these mechanisms impact storage efficiency and read performance for large text and JSON data.

DEPTH ■■■■■12 min read13 days ago

PostgreSQL

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09ByteByteGo · architecture

LLM Prompt Caching Versus Semantic Caching

This post compares prompt caching and semantic caching for large language models to reduce costs and latency. Prompt caching reuses intermediate KV states for shared prefixes, while semantic caching stores previously generated answers for similar questions using vector embeddings. The article explains the mechanics, pricing models, and trade-offs of both approaches.

DEPTH ■■■■■16 min read4 days ago

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10Cloudflare · performance

Yandex outage: Data shows that instead of going dark, malicious bots went on the move

Following physical strikes on Yandex data centers, overall HTTP traffic from the network dropped significantly, leading to speculation that malicious bot farms had been disabled. However, traffic analysis revealed that search crawling simply decreased while malicious automation quickly migrated to other hosting providers with identical fingerprints. Consequently, overall malicious bot traffic remained flat, demonstrating that network disruptions do not stop portable automated workloads.

DEPTH ■■■■■8 min read11 days ago

Incidents & Postmortems

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11PlanetScale · performance

TIN v1.0.6: 2-3x faster, with support for stemming

Following competitive benchmarks that highlighted opportunities for optimization, the developers of the TIN full-text search index for Postgres released versions 1.0.4 and 1.0.6. These updates added Snowball stemming for 18 languages, optimized top-k sorting queries with deterministic tiebreakers, and improved overall query performance. As a result, benchmark tests show that TIN outperforms competing extensions across conjunction, disjunction, and phrase query workloads.

DEPTH ■■■■■8 min read2 weeks ago

PostgreSQL

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12Cloudflare · postmortem

Inside Hyperdrive: How we solved a rare Hyperdrive MySQL caching bug

During the beta of MySQL support for Hyperdrive, engineers investigated rare empty query responses and connection hangs occurring in 0.001% of requests. They discovered that sharing the data center cache between client and endpoint nodes caused protocol capability mismatches when translating MySQL wire messages. The team resolved the issue by standardizing the cache to always store responses encoded with canonical Hyperdrive capabilities.

DEPTH ■■■■■9 min read11 days ago

MySQL

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13ByteByteGo · architecture

How Netflix Taught an LLM to Recommend Movies So That You Keep Watching

Netflix developed GenRec, an LLM-based recommendation ranker designed to interpret viewing histories and item metadata in plain text to score movies and TV shows. By adapting an open-source foundation model in a two-phase training process and employing context engineering to reduce token usage, the team improved catalog ranking and satisfaction prediction. The system balances general language knowledge with domain-specific constraints to manage costs and personalization.

DEPTH ■■■■■15 min read2 weeks ago

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14Tailscale · tutorial

It's time to make your own RSS reader

This post walks through the process of self-hosting a personal RSS reader using FreshRSS and Docker, secured privately over a Tailscale network. The author details the configuration of environment variables, auth keys, and Docker compose deployment to avoid exposing the service to the open web. The result is a private, algorithm-free news reader accessible across multiple devices and integrable with external reading apps or AI agents.

DEPTH ■■■■■10 min read9 days ago

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15Cloudflare · architecture

Under the hood, off the hot path: How D1 scales to millions of databases

Cloudflare scaled its serverless SQLite database, D1, to support millions of databases by decoupling the control plane from the data plane. The team used distributed metadata caching via Workers KV, optimized database connections through Hyperdrive, and implemented a self-correcting heartbeat mechanism. This architecture prevents centralized bottlenecks and allows D1 to handle rapid on-demand database creation efficiently.

DEPTH ■■■■■22 min read12 days ago

Databases

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16ByteByteGo · architecture

Why LLMs Agree With You Even When You’re Wrong

Large language models often agree with incorrect user claims because their training rewards human approval and helpfulness over strict accuracy. This behavior, known as sycophancy, is driven by reinforcement learning from human feedback and conversational pressure. Teams can mitigate this issue by using synthetic training data, Constitutional AI principles, and internal activation probes to penalize agreeable falsehoods.

DEPTH ■■■■■13 min read2 weeks ago

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17PlanetScale · architecture

Building a faster, lazier router for Postgres

To reduce overhead when routing queries across PostgreSQL shards, the Neki router avoids unnecessary parsing and decodes responses lazily. By keeping data in its original wire format and only decoding columns when strictly required for operations like limits or sorting, the router significantly improves performance.

DEPTH ■■■■■16 min read3 weeks ago

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18Cloudflare · scaling

Rewinding the exponential: How we keep hardware usage down

Cloudflare tackled exponential traffic growth against linear hardware growth by continuously evolving their data pipeline architecture over five years. Key optimizations included breaking up monolithic schemas, switching to zstd compression, decoupling pipeline transit from database replication, decentralizing sampling, and moving aggregations earlier in the pipeline. These strategies significantly reduced backbone bandwidth usage, network congestion, and storage requirements while preserving data quality.

DEPTH ■■■■■12 min read12 days ago

Infrastructure

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19PlanetScale · architecture

Sequences and other volatiles in Neki

Neki implements PostgreSQL sequences in a sharded system by handling volatile and stable expressions at the router level rather than pushing them to shards. Because sequences require centralized control to guarantee unique values without duplication across distributed shards, sequence operations are routed exclusively through an authoritative source. The query planner ensures that volatile expressions are evaluated with the correct row cardinality based on the final table expression.

DEPTH ■■■■■14 min read11 days ago

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20ByteByteGo · architecture

How to Build Models Without Language, with Logical Intelligence

This article explores the limitations of large language models on constraint satisfaction problems like Sudoku and introduces energy-based reasoning models as an alternative. It explains how energy-based models utilize continuous latent spaces and descending energy gradients rather than left-to-right token generation. The result is a more reliable approach for non-language reasoning tasks.

DEPTH ■■■■■19 min read13 days ago

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