Get the weekly digestSubscribe

/ THE FEED /

Read what ships.

Deep, recent reads ranked by depth and freshness.

Microservicesremove filterData Engineeringremove filterDatabasesremove filterInfrastructureremove filterGitLabremove filterRustremove filterGitHubremove filterZalandoremove filterClear all

  1. 01GitHub · architecture

    The bridge to agent-scale Git infrastructure

    GitHub faced infrastructure capacity limits and a 25ms cross-region network round trip when migrating repositories to Azure. The team changed the storage quorum from repository-wide locks to per-reference serialization and introduced ephemeral virtual replicas backed by object storage. This raised write throughput, prevented slow replicas from blocking traffic, and decoupled read scaling from the write quorum.

    DEPTH ■■■■■8 min read6 days ago

    Infrastructure

    Sign in to save and rate

  2. 02GitHub · architecture

    From 2,500 requests to 24: Rebuilding star history without the stargazers

    GitHub faced abuse and performance issues because tools were scraping user identities to reconstruct repository star history. The engineering team collaborated with maintainers to build a purpose-built aggregate endpoint that returns daily star counts without identities and filters by time before aggregation. This reduced request volume from thousands to a few dozen and eliminated heavy database scans.

    DEPTH ■■■■■8 min read12 days ago

    Microservices

    Sign in to save and rate

  3. 03Zalando · 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

    Sign in to save and rate

  4. 04GitHub · architecture

    Building Git infrastructure for agent-scale development

    GitHub is redesigning its Git infrastructure to handle the massive surge in concurrent read and write operations driven by agentic software development and high-volume workloads. The team is decoupling storage from compute by leveraging Azure Blob Storage for durability and lightweight compute workers for requests, which separates scaling dimensions. In internal benchmarks, this approach achieves up to 35 times higher write throughput and independent read scalability.

    DEPTH ■■■■■9 min read2 weeks ago

    Infrastructure

    Sign in to save and rate