Case studies
A closer look at what companies built, what changed, and what we learned.
5 case studies
04.09
Instagram's first architecture
InstagramPostgreSQLS3
What we found
Familiar components, each given a single responsibility, carried a very small team a long way.
05.09
Stripe's idempotency keys
Stripe
What we found
Retrying with the same key returns the stored outcome instead of charging a second time.
08.10
how Discord stores trillions of messages
DiscordCassandra
What we found
Coalescing identical reads cut database load before the storage engine was ever replaced.
10.06
Amazon Dynamo, the paper
Amazon
What we found
Accepting writes during a partition means the application must reconcile divergent versions later.
28.06
GitLab’s database incident
GitLabPostgreSQL
What we found
The recovery paths that were assumed to exist had never been exercised until the night they were needed.