Backend · Sub-topic
Reliability & performance
How services degrade under load and how to keep them alive.
-
Guide
Backend Under Load: Eight Failure Modes
A system design interview field guide to how backends actually degrade — connection pool saturation, cache stampedes, lock contention, hot partitions, slow queries, network bottlenecks, and GC pauses — plus how they cascade into each other in a real incident.
-
Guide
Distributed Systems & Backend Patterns
60+ patterns that keep production systems alive under failure, load, and scale — resilience, load management, caching, messaging, databases, distributed coordination, traffic routing, reliability, scalability, security, and observability.