Networking & Load Balancing

Animated explainers on networking & load balancing.

All Caching & Performance Databases Kafka & Streaming Distributed Systems System Design Networking & Load Balancing ML & Agentic AI

Apr 2, 2026

Load Balancing Fundamentals: L4, L7, and Why Round-Robin Lies

Round-robin assumes every backend is identical. In a mixed-instance Kubernetes cluster it is not, and equal request counts produce unequal CPU pressure.

Networking & Load Balancing

Apr 1, 2026

REST vs gRPC Streaming: When Persistent Connections Help and When They Hurt

gRPC streaming sounds like a free win over REST. It is not. Long-lived streams interact badly with load balancers, deploys, and connection draining.

Networking & Load Balancing

Mar 18, 2026

L4 vs L7 Load Balancing: When Speed Beats Smartness

Layer 4 forwards packets blind and fast. Layer 7 inspects each request and routes by content. Here is how to choose, and why most production systems use both.

Networking & Load Balancing

Mar 14, 2026

HTTP/1.1 vs HTTP/2 vs HTTP/3: A Story About Removing Different Kinds of Blocking

Each HTTP version fixed the head-of-line blocking the previous one could not. HTTP/2 multiplexed at the app layer, HTTP/3 moved to QUIC to fix it at the transport layer.

Networking & Load Balancing

Mar 10, 2026

Why Backend Engineers Need the OSI Model: Naming the Layer Saves Hours

The OSI model is not trivia. Each layer corresponds to a class of failure mode, and naming the layer first turns guesswork into a directed search.

Networking & Load Balancing

Feb 26, 2026

The Other Half of the Outbox: Consumer-Side Deduplication

The outbox gives you at-least-once delivery, which means duplicates are not a bug, they are the contract. The consumer side needs an inbox table or a Redis dedup store keyed on event_id.

Networking & Load Balancing

Feb 24, 2026

Polling vs SSE vs WebSocket: Pick the Simplest Transport That Meets the Need

Most teams reach for WebSockets when they hear real-time. Polling and SSE are usually enough, cheaper to operate, and friendlier to your existing HTTP stack.