Databases by default do not prevent us from all concurrency issues. Let’s understand more issues and their solutions. — In the last blog, we looked at DirtyRead, DirtyWrite and Read Skew concurrency problems and learnt how Read Committed and the Snapshot Isolation levels solve them. Let’s learn about other concurrency problems that can still occur: Lost Updates If two transactions perform “Read, Modify and Write” concurrently, the change made by one…

Database Isolation levels can get confusing and hard to understand. But understanding it is a must to build reliable systems since databases by default provide weaker isolations which do not prevent all concurrency issues. — I wrote this after a joyful read of Martin Kleppmann’s Design Data-Intensive Application. In this write up, I would work on covering the isolation levels and the concurrency problem they solve. For those interested in the detailed read, I refer you to the book.

Take the data from Kafka to Redshift in near-realtime — The story of making a cloud-native near real-time data pipeline using Kafka, KafkaConnect, and RedshiftSink in AWS. CDC + Sink. RedshiftSink is the new open source project from Practo. It comes with a high-performance low overhead data loader for loading data in Redshift with rich masking support to ensure you…

Short story of playing with Prometheus metrics and functions to measure, observe, then optimize. —

When you are finding a doctor, booking an appointment or consulting a doctor online on Practo, a lot of work is done asynchronously using Job queue systems (a.k.a workers). This is a critical part of our architecture and it plays an important role in making our systems scalable and reliable. …

Containers are changing the landscape of how the applications are developed and run. With containers coming into picture, the application design has become more distributed making the network a very critical component. Container networking is somewhat complicated and not that easily understood. …