Modernization

The Decisions, Near-Disasters, and 35% Cost Savings from Rebuilding a Live Bidding Engine

Why Redis and not Kafka? Why Fargate and not Kubernetes? And what happened in staging that nearly derailed the entire migration? The honest debrief, tradeoffs, the mistake that almost broke production, and the final results.

What Happens When a Container Dies Mid-Auction: Resilience Engineering in Practice

Building a reliable system means planning for failure, not just success. Here's how we engineered Multi-AZ failover, sub-30-second crash recovery, and observability that turned hour-long incidents into 10-minute fixes.

Connecting a Fleet: How Redis Pub/Sub Makes Socket.IO Scale Across Containers

The core challenge of scaling Socket.IO is that each server instance is an isolated island. Here's how we used @socket.io/redis-adapter and the Socket.IO v4 upgrade to bridge those islands into one unified real-time system.

Redesigning for Scale: The Architecture That Replaced a Single Point of Failure

After the production outage, we had a clear mandate: no more single points of failure. Here's the new distributed architecture we designed, from ALB through ECS Fargate to Redis, and why we made each choice.

The Day Our Auction Platform Went Dark: A Production Post-Mortem

A traffic spike brought down our entire real-time platform without warning. Here's the story of what broke, why it broke, and the architectural decisions that followed.