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Distributed Systemsremove filterTestingremove filterData Engineeringremove filterObservabilityremove filterDepth 4+remove filterClear all

  1. 01The Pragmatic Engineer · architecture

    The Pulse: Anthropic builds its own source control system

    Anthropic experienced a massive increase in code merges due to the heavy use of AI coding agents, which quickly overwhelmed standard Git scaling limits and CI checkouts. To solve this, a small engineering team built a custom centralized version control system called Scion backed by Google Spanner and Cloud Storage, along with a code review tool called Antique. This move successfully migrated the entire monorepo off Git and eliminated bottlenecks, though the architecture drew controversy over similarities to Meta's Mononoke.

    DEPTH ■■■■■12 min read5 days ago

    ArchitectureDistributed Systems

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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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