System design and architecture decisions for modern cloud-native applications.
24 articles
HPA scales on CPU and memory, but real workloads spike on queue depth and request rate. KEDA brings event-driven autoscaling — including genuine scale-to-zero — to Kubernetes.
microVMs give you the hardware isolation of a virtual machine with boot times measured in milliseconds. Here's how stripped-down VMMs like Firecracker pull it off, and why serverless runs on them.
Running every build in a fresh, isolated, throwaway pod eliminates whole classes of CI security and contamination problems. Here's the architecture, why it beats shared build hosts, and the trade-offs.
Mounting the Docker socket into a build pod is one of the most common — and most dangerous — CI patterns. Here's why rootless BuildKit is the safer architecture, and what actually changes under the hood.
How gVisor intercepts syscalls to put a user-space kernel between containers and the host, why it shrinks the attack surface, and the performance trade-offs you actually pay.
Why building images as root via the Docker socket is a security liability, and how rootless BuildKit produces OCI images with no daemon, no privileged socket, and no host root.
Helm is the package manager for Kubernetes. It turns sprawling YAML into reusable, parameterized, versioned charts you can install, upgrade, and roll back with one command. Here's how it works.
A canary deployment releases new code to a small slice of traffic first, so problems hit few users. Here's how canaries work, what metrics to watch, and how to automate promotion.
Kubernetes can't scale a Deployment to zero on its own. KEDA can — driving replicas down to nothing when idle and back up on the first request. Here's how it works and the trade-offs.
Running stateful databases on Kubernetes used to be a bad idea. KubeBlocks changes the math with operators that handle provisioning, failover, backups, and scaling across many engines.
Scale-to-zero shuts idle services down to zero replicas and wakes them on demand, cutting cost dramatically. Learn the mechanics, the cold-start trade-off, and which workloads suit it.
ClickHouse answers analytical queries over billions of rows in milliseconds. This deep dive explains the columnar architecture, vectorized execution, and design tradeoffs that make it the engine behind so many analytics products.
Ingress is how outside traffic reaches your Kubernetes services through HTTP routing, TLS, and host/path rules — without a LoadBalancer per service. Here's how it works and where Gateway API fits.
Standard containers share the host kernel, which is a real attack surface. gVisor adds a user-space kernel between your container and the host. Here's how it works and what it costs.
The HPA adds and removes pod replicas to match load. Understand its control loop, the scaling algorithm, why metrics and requests matter, and where it stops — so you can scale safely.
Whether your app holds state in memory or pushes it to backing services changes everything about how it scales and recovers. Here's the practical difference and how to design for each.
The Twelve-Factor App is a set of principles for building cloud-native, portable, scalable services. Here's each factor explained with practical examples and where the methodology shows its age.
Multi-region deployment improves latency and resilience but introduces hard problems around data consistency and routing. This guide explains the patterns, the trade-offs, and how to decide what you actually need.
Client-side analytics SDKs are slow, blocked, and inaccurate. Server-side capture into a columnar store like ClickHouse fixes all three. Here's the architecture and why ClickHouse is the right engine for it.
A reverse proxy forwards requests; an API gateway manages an API. They overlap heavily and confuse everyone. Here's what each actually does, where the line is, and when you need which.
Rolling, blue-green, and canary deployments each trade off risk, cost, and rollback speed differently. A practical comparison to help you pick the right release strategy for your app.
A VPC is your own isolated slice of a cloud network. This guide explains subnets, route tables, security groups, NAT, and how to design private networking that keeps databases off the public internet.
Scale up or scale out? The two strategies have different limits, costs, and failure modes. Here's a clear breakdown of when to add bigger machines versus more machines — and why most systems need both.
Scheduled tasks, background workers, and event-driven queues all solve different problems. Here's how to pick the right one — and how each runs on PandaStack.