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Services and running it

Module 15 of the System Design Masterclass. Every lesson here is free to read, with no account.

  • 11 lessons
  • 3 h 28 min of reading
  1. 88Monolith or microservices, and where to cutWhen to keep one program and when to split it into services, how to choose the boundaries, and how to move one piece at a time without a big rewrite.24 minCore
  2. 89How services find each otherHow one service finds the current addresses of another service when copies start, stop and move: DNS, a load balancer, or a service registry, and what each one costs.12 minDepth
  3. 90Multi-region: latency, failover, data residencyWhy an app runs in more than one region, how a second region is used (active-passive or active-active), what a region failover costs in seconds and lost writes, and where the data may live.24 minDepth
  4. 91Logs, metrics and traces: what each one tells youWhat a log, a metric and a trace each tell you, the four numbers to watch on any service, and how one request is followed through many servers.24 minCore
  5. 92SLOs, error budgets and alertsHow to turn a reliability goal into a measured target, an error budget and an alert that fires when the budget is used too fast, and how a contract differs from a target.12 minDepth
  6. 93Case study: Metrics and logging pipelineHow to design the system that collects metrics and logs from thousands of servers: agents, ingestion, a queue, time-series storage, queries, retention and cost, with the numbers.28 minDepth · Case study
  7. 94Debugging an incident: a methodA four-step method for a live problem: detect it, narrow it down with the dashboards, stop the damage, and then fix the cause so it does not return.24 minCore
  8. 95Safe releases: canary, blue-green, rollback, feature flagsHow to put a new version live so that a bug hurts few users and ends fast: the build and test pipeline, rolling, blue-green and canary releases, rollback, feature flags and A/B tests.24 minDepth
  9. 96Testing a system: unit, integration, contract, load, chaosWhat unit, integration, contract, load and chaos tests each catch, and how to break a part of a system on purpose in a safe way.12 minDepth
  10. 97Containers, Kubernetes and infrastructure as codeJust enough about containers, images, pods, services, deployments and infrastructure as code: what each one is, the problem it solves, and what happens when a container runs out of memory.12 minDepth
  11. 98What makes the bill explodeThe four usual reasons a cloud bill jumps: servers that are too big, full price for steady load, one user or job that runs wild, and logs that grow without a limit.12 minDepth

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