System Design

Do you ever feel like your network infrastructure is a black box? When I first dove into cloud networking, the term Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) sounded mysterious—like a secret compartment in the sky. Over the years, I’ve come to see a VPC as your custom sandbox inside a public cloud: a private playground built on shared real estate. In this post, we’ll unpack what a VPC really is, how it works under the hood, and why it’s an indispensable tool for any software craftsperson aiming for secure, scalable cloud architecture. ...

What is caching? Storing frequently accessed information closer to where you need it for faster subsequent access to it. Caching is so ubiquitous that you probably have benefited from it without even knowing about it. Your computer or your phone or other mobile devices use caching at different levels like at its hard drive, CPU, GPU, browser, operating system etc to improve its performance. And when you think about things outside your computer, like databases, web servers, DNS etc also use caches for the same reason, improving performance, by keeping frequently requested for items closest to where it is accessed, in a faster, more volatile storage system. Also cache storage is often times more expensive than regular storage, as it is often stored either in super fast access memory or solid state drives. Hence choosing what you store in the cache and how much you store in the cache is also something you must consider before deciding to use a cache. ...