/ THE FEED /
Deep, recent reads ranked by depth and freshness.
01PlanetScale · architecture
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
02Meta · architecture
Meta engineers reduced hallucinations and improved reliability in their data pipeline agents by replacing a single heavyweight LLM orchestrator with a thin deterministic router and fourteen specialized subagents. The thin orchestrator handles routing and reliability checks through a fixed protocol, while isolated subagents execute domain reasoning. This architecture reduced configuration preparation time from a day to under an hour.
DEPTH ■■■■■7 min read6 days ago
03PlanetScale · practice
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
04Meta · architecture
Meta built Prometheus, a gigawatt-scale AI supercluster designed to scale up to one million GPUs using multi-generation NVIDIA hardware and specialized backend Ethernet networks. The team achieved high goodput and significantly reduced system interruptions by implementing an in-rack sparing strategy, parallelism-aware fault tolerance, and close co-engineering with vendors. These infrastructure advancements allowed the team to successfully train frontier foundational models like Muse Wonder.
DEPTH ■■■■■17 min read6 days ago
05Honeycomb · architecture
LLM applications emit bulky telemetry containing sensitive user content and disparate attribute names. The team uses an OpenTelemetry Collector pipeline to normalize, enrich, redact, and export this data to Honeycomb. This centralizes control, protects data before it leaves the network, and maintains consistent observability.
DEPTH ■■■■■12 min read2 weeks ago
06Meta · practice
Meta engineers built the Forum app using a human-on-the-loop AI agent workflow that automated planning, building, testing, and verification. By shifting focus from code generation to automated verification, tooling improvements, and architectural legibility, the team reached feature parity in eight weeks while catching systemic memory issues early.
DEPTH ■■■■■8 min read10 days ago
07PlanetScale · architecture
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
08Meta · architecture
Meta developed GEM, a unified recommendation foundation model using an LLM-style architecture called Kunlun to handle heterogeneous ads data across multiple surfaces. The team implemented block attention, custom low-precision kernels, and post-training intelligence transfer techniques like LoopFM and Solaris to scale training efficiency and bypass real-time serving latency bottlenecks. The resulting system delivered an 18.9% conversion improvement and a 12% click-through rate increase across Meta ads surfaces.
DEPTH ■■■■■15 min read12 days ago
09PlanetScale · performance
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
10Meta · architecture
Meta shared its next-generation open networking infrastructure for AI at the OCP Summit 2026, including liquid-cooled 102.4T switch platforms, multiplane scale-out fabrics, and Ethernet-based scale-up solutions. The team also highlighted collaborative industry standards like ESUN and OSPA to unify hardware and transport layers. These open innovations aim to support massive gigawatt-scale AI clusters across diverse data center environments.
DEPTH ■■■■■12 min read12 days ago
11Honeycomb · practice
The Honeycomb Private Cloud team struggled to manually track and integrate rapid infrastructure and configuration changes produced by upstream teams. To solve this, they built custom scripts to generate automated drift reports and eventually integrated AI to help triage and track the necessary follow-up work. As a result, the team successfully scaled their integration process into a reliable daily workflow.
DEPTH ■■■■■10 min read2 weeks ago
12PlanetScale · architecture
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
13Meta · architecture
Meta implemented GenRecs Tokenization to replace dedicated item IDs with a stable semantic vocabulary for ads recommendation. Using a three-stage encoding and quantization pipeline, the system enables language models to reason about ad content and user preferences simultaneously. This approach resulted in a +0.35% lift in conversions and improved cold-start performance for new entities.
DEPTH ■■■■■6 min read6 days ago
14PlanetScale · architecture
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
15Meta · scaling
Meta's infrastructure handled record-breaking traffic during the 2026 World Cup, including 30 million messages per second on WhatsApp, by relying on automated load balancing, capacity buffers, and targeted pre-builds. Traffic patterns revealed that surges occurred primarily during breaks rather than gameplay, requiring region-specific forecasting rather than cross-region load shifting. The systems maintained full reliability and allowed normal continuous deployment schedules to continue without manual intervention or system freezes.
DEPTH ■■■■■5 min read10 days ago
16PlanetScale · architecture
PlanetScale expanded its database offering to Microsoft Azure by adapting its Kubernetes-based infrastructure to handle Azure's networking constraints. The engineering team overcame Azure's private IP limits and slow pod startup times by implementing block-based IP allocation via a custom CNI plugin. This approach successfully increased IP capacity and removed the Kubernetes API server from the critical path during pod initialization.
DEPTH ■■■■■3 min read12 days ago
17Meta · migration
Meta deployed the emerging Media over QUIC (MoQ) protocol for Instagram Live ingest on iOS and Android to replace their legacy RUSH protocol. By using edge translation to avoid backend rewrites and a phased rollout strategy, the team achieved metric parity with the old protocol without regressions. This deployment establishes a foundation to extend MoQ across Meta's applications for lower-latency and more resilient video streaming.
DEPTH ■■■■■8 min read13 days ago
18Honeycomb · practice
Software development practices are shifting as artificial intelligence makes advanced rigor, such as formal verification and property-based testing, an affordable default for greenfield projects. Developers can leverage AI agents to thoroughly review code and enforce strict architectural boundaries rather than just writing code faster. However, successful outcomes require comprehensive development systems and thinking rather than relying on AI alone.
DEPTH ■■■■■3 min read5 days ago
19Honeycomb · practice
Engineering leaders must establish clear structures and cultural norms to reduce the psychological identity threat and anxiety developers experience when adopting AI tools. Research indicates that organizational trust regarding AI is currently fractured but repairable through realigned expectations and accountability. Furthermore, engineers are advised to build durable sources of professional identity rather than relying solely on mastery of specific languages or legacy codebases.
DEPTH ■■■■■3 min read3 weeks ago
20PlanetScale · scaling
Growing applications often encounter hot shards when certain tenants or data subsets outgrow initial sharding strategies based on workspace IDs. To mitigate this, teams can scale up resources, isolate large tenants into specific key ranges, or fundamentally change the shard key for problematic tables based on access patterns. Neki facilitates these adjustments by allowing declarative data topologies and online resharding without downtime.
DEPTH ■■■■■7 min read3 weeks ago
