Real Domains • March 18, 2024 • 5 min read
Building a Rate Limiter — Algorithms and Real-World Choices
Token bucket, leaky bucket, sliding window — what each actually does, and the practical implementation in distributed systems.
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Real Domains
Real Domains • November 28, 2023 • 4 min read
Multi-Tenancy — Shared, Isolated, and the Space In Between
The three main tenancy models, their trade-offs at scale, and a hybrid approach that often beats the pure cases.
Real Domains • August 24, 2023 • 5 min read
Audit Log Implementation — Doing It Right the First Time
Audit logs sound trivial and get messy fast. The data model, the event capture, and the retrieval patterns that make audit logs useful instead of write-only.
Real Domains • April 18, 2023 • 4 min read
Building a Real-Time Notification System
The architecture of a notification service that delivers to web, mobile, email, and SMS reliably at scale. Channel fanout, user preferences, and the delivery guarantees that matter.
Real Domains • September 17, 2022 • 4 min read
Building Product Search with Elasticsearch
What actually matters when designing a product search — indexing, relevance, aggregations, and the operational realities that turn "let's use Elasticsearch" into a multi-month project.
Real Domains • April 29, 2022 • 5 min read
Banking Ledger Design — Patterns That Actually Hold Up
The data models and constraints that make a banking ledger both performant and provably correct, learned the hard way over several years of building them.