Engineering At Scale

Weekly column simplifying databases, system design, architecture, and engineering careers with easy explanations, valuable insights, and expert advice.

By Animesh Gaitonde

· Over 6,000 subscribers

How NGINX's Event-Driven Architecture Handles Million Concurrent Connections?

Overview of NGINX's Event Driven Non-Blocking I/O Architecture
Mar 17, 2025
By Animesh Gaitonde

Cache Stampede Prevention: Distributed Locking, Pub/Sub, and Request Coalescing

From distributed locks to request coalescing: techniques for coordinating cache rebuilds and preventing cascading failures.
Jun 8
By Animesh Gaitonde

Redis Locks: Working, Failure Modes and Real-World Examples

How do reservation systems prevent thousands of concurrent users from booking the same seat?
May 31
By Animesh Gaitonde

How Distributed Systems Store Files: Databases, Object Storage, and the Trade-offs

From database BLOBs to object stores — understanding the architecture patterns and when to use each
Mar 21
By Animesh Gaitonde

Database Proxies: Connection Management at Scale

How to scale a database to handle 100K connections?
Dec 13, 2025
By Animesh Gaitonde

Connection Pooling: Fundamentals, Challenges and Trade-offs

How to handle 10,000 concurrent requests without crashing your database
Nov 29, 2025
By Animesh Gaitonde

API Pagination: Techniques, Real-World Applications And Best Practices

Learn how X (Twitter) and Spotify use API pagination to handle massive datasets efficiently
Oct 20, 2025
By Animesh Gaitonde

Anatomy of Facebook's 2010 outage: Cache invalidation gone wrong

How a cache validation bug cascaded into Facebook's longest downtime
Sep 2, 2025
By Animesh Gaitonde