Solvathis
News and analysis from the world of production systems.
Multi-Region Failover Planning
June 21, 2026
Geographic disaster recovery success is determined long before an outage strikes. Establishing acceptable replication lag and designating operational authority to execute failover appear to be policy questions, but they dictate core technical parameters ranging from database clustering to telemetry placement.
Persistent state remains the hardest technical bottleneck. Stateless compute nodes deploy horizontally and spin up across arbitrary clouds within minutes, but replicating a massive database requires deliberate design. Asynchronous streaming provides survivability while introducing potential data loss windows; defining explicit business tolerances dictates viable replication models.
The Operator's Guide to Load Testing
July 31, 2026
Benchmark simulations repeatedly fail to anticipate live incidents because synthetic request topologies overlook messy reality. Evenly distributed traffic aimed at single endpoints provides isolated micro-benchmarks. Real degradation occurs when synchronized retry floods slam backends after a moment…
What Good Observability Actually Looks Like
July 21, 2026
Monitoring consoles sprawl uncontrollably while offering little insight during live incidents. True observability operates under inverted priorities: an on-call engineer gets paged, and telemetry systems must identify the root diff within sixty seconds.…
Practical Notes on Postgres Connection Pooling
August 27, 2026
Handling PostgreSQL backends imposes substantial overhead because each active client spawns a dedicated process consuming significant RAM, making intermediary connection management mandatory at scale. While session-level pooling preserves compatibility seamlessly, transaction pooling aggressively re…
Reading Latency Percentiles Without Fooling Yourself
July 13, 2026
Averages conceal what percentiles reveal: the request mix's tail. A service averaging fifty milliseconds can still be sending one in twenty users through a two-second odyssey, and those users - the ones hitting the cold paths, the expired sessions, the overloaded shard - are the ones filing the tick…
More reading
- Why Edge Caching Still Matters in 2026 — Infrastructure, September 15, 2026
- A Practical Guide to API Rate Limiting — Engineering, September 18, 2026
- Structuring DNS for Reliability — Networking, May 4, 2026
About us
Founded by former SREs and network engineers, our editorial desk focuses on the practical side of operating distributed services - less hype, more packet captures.