Explained: Cookie Consent

You land on a news site to read one article. Before you can see a single word of it, a banner fills half the screen. "We value your privacy." There are three buttons: Accept All, Manage Preferences, and something like "Continue without accepting" that's grey and tiny and hard to find. You click Accept All because you just want to read the article. This happens roughly a dozen times a day for most people using the web. Most… Read More

Explained: CoreDNS

You deploy a new service to your Kubernetes cluster. The pods come up healthy. You open a shell inside one of them and try to reach another service by name — http://payments-service — and nothing happens. Timeout. You try the full name: http://payments-service.billing.svc.cluster.local . Still nothing. You try the service's ClusterIP directly, and it works fine. Something in the cluster is resolving names, but it's not resolving yours. If … Read More

Architecture: Kafka

Every time you place an order, stream a video, or tap a payment terminal, dozens of systems need to know about it — simultaneously, reliably, in order. Getting data from where it's produced to where it needs to be processed, at scale, without losing anything, is one of the hardest problems in distributed systems. Apache Kafka was built specifically to solve it. Kafka is now the backbone of real-time data infrastructure at most large technolog… Read More