Blue-Green vs Canary vs Rolling Deployments
How the three common deployment strategies differ, when to use each one, and what health checks, traffic shifting, rollback plans, and database compatibility need to be in place first.
devdevopsdeployments
Posts tagged “reliability”
Tiny explainers grouped by topic. Spend less time Googling, more time building.
Structured Logging That Survives Production
How to make logs useful under real traffic: correlation IDs, JSON event shape, sampling rules, and PII redaction that does not depend on everyone remembering.
devobservabilitylogging
Events, Commands, and Sagas — coordinate cross‑service work without tight coupling
Commands say 'do X', events say 'X happened'. Use sagas (orchestration or choreography) for long‑running, cross‑service workflows with compensations, idempotency, and reliable messaging.
devarchitecturemicroservices
Kubernetes, Minimal Survival Guide — ship, debug, and sleep at night
The 80% you actually need: Pods, Deployments, Services, Ingress/Gateway, Requests/Limits, Probes, Config & Secrets, HPA, storage, and the kubectl commands you’ll use daily.
devopskubernetes
Rate Limiting Strategies — windows, buckets, and distributed guards
Fixed/sliding windows, token & leaky buckets, GCRA, and real-world implementations (Redis, NGINX, Envoy). Covers headers, bursts, backoff, multi‑DC, and tuning.
devapireliability
Circuit Breakers & Bulkheads, Explained — fail fast, contain blast radius
Real-world settings and copy‑paste snippets for circuit breakers (closed/open/half‑open) and bulkheads (bounded concurrency/queues). Works with HTTP, gRPC, and message calls.
devreliabilityresilience
The Testing Pyramid (That Actually Works) — fast feedback, minimal flakes
Pragmatic ratios, what to test where, and how to keep CI under 10 minutes: unit vs integration vs E2E, contract & component tests, data management, and flake-killers.
devtestingqa
Queues 101 — At‑Least‑Once (and Why “Exactly‑Once” Is a Myth)
Design for duplicates and reordering. Use idempotency, an inbox/outbox, and per‑key ordering to get effectively‑once processing in real systems.
devarchitecturemessaging
Zero‑Downtime Migrations — expand/contract without breaking prod
Change schemas safely with backward‑compatible steps, dual writes, background backfills, and rolling deploys. Postgres‑flavored, but patterns apply to MySQL and friends.
devdatabasesmigrations
Timeouts, Retries, and Backoff — the practical playbook
Design request deadlines, hop timeouts, and idempotent retries with jitter so you protect upstreams, tame tail latency, and avoid cascading failures.
devreliabilityresilience
API Error Handling That Helps Clients Recover
Which status codes to use, how to shape errors consistently, and what to log so clients get clear signals and you get useful telemetry.
devapihttp
Idempotency — What it is and Why it Matters (especially for APIs)
A quick, practical explainer of idempotency: what it means, how HTTP methods relate, and how to implement idempotent POSTs with idempotency keys to make retries safe.
devapisreliability