Cloud & Scale

Building APIs that Scale: Design Principles and Patterns APIs that scale face bigger traffic, more data, and a wider range of clients. The goal is a stable contract for developers while the backend grows behind the scenes. Good design balances performance, reliability, and simplicity, so teams can add capacity without breaking existing integrations. Start with a clear interface, then layer reliability and efficiency as you scale. Principles for scalable APIs Stable contracts and explicit semantics Idempotent operations wherever possible Handling backpressure and graceful degradation Observability from day one Patterns that help scale Rate limiting and quotas to protect services Caching strategies and clear invalidation rules Pagination and cursor-based paging for large lists Async processing and message queues Circuit breakers and sensible timeouts API gateway and global load balancing Versioning and clear deprecation paths Security and least privilege for clients Choosing REST or GraphQL REST offers simplicity and caching; GraphQL gives flexibility for client-specific needs. A practical approach is to provide a stable REST surface for core data, plus a gateway that supports GraphQL for advanced clients. Always aim for backwards compatibility and good documentation. ...

Databases for Scale: Sharding, Replication, and Performance When apps grow, data workloads change. You need a plan that balances capacity, reliability, and speed. The three pillars most teams use are sharding, replication, and performance tuning. Each has clear goals and trade-offs, and they often work best together. Sharding distributes data across multiple database instances. This reduces hot spots and lets queries run in parallel. You might shard by customer, region, or a user ID range. Common strategies include hash-based sharding, range-based sharding, and directory-based sharding which combines ideas. The benefit is more throughput, but cross-shard queries become harder and rebalancing data can require downtime or careful orchestration. A practical approach is to start with a simple shard key and keep migrations small and reversible. ...