Kafka Consumer Lag: How to Calculate Time-to-Overflow Before the Incident
A practical guide to consumer lag math: partition bottleneck, max.poll.interval.ms misconfiguration, and the alerts you need before production incidents.
8 min read
Blog
Practical guides for platform engineers — Kafka, APIs, rate limiting, latency.
Latency Numbers Every Platform Engineer Should Know in 2026
Updated Jeff Dean latency numbers for cloud-native 2026: NVMe, cross-AZ Kafka, Lambda cold starts, and why N+1 beats network as the top latency killer.
6 min read
API Breaking Changes: A Complete Checklist for REST and JSON Schema
What counts as a breaking change, why request and response schemas follow different rules, and how to version safely without breaking clients.
7 min read
Rate Limiting Strategies Compared: Token Bucket, Fixed Window, and PSD2
Fixed window boundary exploit, token bucket burst math, retry storm prevention, and why banking APIs need different configuration than public APIs.
8 min read
Kafka Message Size: How Record V2 Overhead, Compression, and Batching Really Work
RecordBatch vs Record overhead, why linger.ms=0 kills compression, zstd vs gzip benchmarks, and the replica.fetch.max.bytes silent killer.
7 min read