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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03Shopify · architecture

We gave AI agents a mobile dev environment

Engineering teams outgrew their local machines while running parallel AI mobile development agents, constrained by heavy builds and lack of iOS tools on Linux. To solve this, they built Remote Dev using warm pools of remote Macs connected via SSH alongside separate Linux VMs for Android virtualization, paired with agent skills and live browser streaming. This setup shifted workflow bottlenecks, increasing AI-merged pull requests from 6 percent to 61 percent.

DEPTH ■■■■■9 min read3 days ago

ArchitectureMobile

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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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05Shopify · architecture

How Shopify turns open models into task experts

Shopify uses a continual learning flywheel to post-train open models, such as NVIDIA Nemotron, to serve as dedicated subagents for specific tasks like GraphQL generation. By optimizing inference and utilizing automated self-healing to generate training data from production failures, the team successfully created task experts that outperform frontier models while reducing serving costs by 90-98% and improving response times.

DEPTH ■■■■■5 min read4 days ago

Architecture

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06PlanetScale · 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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07Shopify · architecture

Cross-store product clustering across millions of stores

Shopify needed to group identical product listings from millions of different merchants under a single global identifier. To solve this at scale without comparing every possible pair, the team implemented a multi-stage pipeline using vector retrieval, a tiered scoring system of ML models, and a bounded graph clustering approach. This architecture successfully standardizes product data across the entire platform while controlling computational costs.

DEPTH ■■■■■13 min read5 days ago

Architecture

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08Cloudflare · 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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09Shopify · tooling

Building Overexposed: understanding application exposure

The team built an automated scanner called Overexposed to track internet-facing services and verify access controls across Kubernetes and Cloud Run. By querying live cloud inventories and probing endpoints like an outsider, the scanner classifies exposure while avoiding false assumptions from static config files. As a result, the engineering organization improved accuracy and significantly reduced inconclusive findings over time.

DEPTH ■■■■■8 min read5 days ago

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10PlanetScale · 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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11Cloudflare · 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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12PlanetScale · 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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13Cloudflare · 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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14Cloudflare · 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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15Shopify · architecture

ShopGym: Realistic, reproducible sandboxes for shopping agents

Training and evaluating shopping agents is difficult due to changing live store environments, bot detection, and limited hand-built test stores. The team developed ShopGym, a framework that converts live storefronts into self-contained, anonymized sandbox shops and generates benchmark tasks. Evaluation showed that synthetic shops preserve key structural properties and behavioral alignment with live stores, giving agents a reliable environment to practice and improve.

DEPTH ■■■■■6 min read3 weeks ago

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16PlanetScale · 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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17Cloudflare · 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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18PlanetScale · 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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19Cloudflare · architecture

Filter, reshape, and redact logs before export with Transformers

Cloudflare integrated SQL-based log transformation directly into its Logpush export pipeline, allowing customers to filter, redact, and reshape logs before delivery. The team chose to embed the Apache DataFusion engine in-process using Rust and Go across an Arrow IPC boundary to ensure high throughput and avoid network latency. As a result, the system processes high-volume log streams efficiently while maintaining predictable resource usage and strict delivery reliability.

DEPTH ■■■■■8 min read13 days ago

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20PlanetScale · architecture

PlanetScale is now available on Azure

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

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