InfoQ - Distributed Systems

Article: Replacing Database Sequences at Scale Without Breaking 100+ Services

Saumya Tyagi — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 09:00:00 GMT

The article discusses the challenges faced during a migration from a relational database to NoSQL, focusing on the importance of database sequences for unique identifiers. It outlines the development of a new sequence service using DynamoDB and a two-tier caching architecture.

By Saumya Tyagi

Article: Event-Driven Patterns for Cloud-Native Banking: Lessons from What Works and What Hurts

Chris Tacey-Green — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 09:00:00 GMT

Event-driven architecture helps banks decouple systems, scale services, and create clear activity trails. But it also introduces complexity, new failure modes, and operational challenges. Chris Tacey-Green explains where it adds value in banking systems and the practical patterns, such as inbox/outbox and stable event contracts, needed to make it reliable.

By Chris Tacey-Green

Discord Engineers Add Distributed Tracing to Elixir's Actor Model without Performance Penalty

Steef-Jan Wiggers — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 10:13:00 GMT

Discord engineering detailed how they added distributed tracing to Elixir's actor model. Their custom Transport library wraps messages with trace context and uses dynamic sampling to handle million-user fanouts. CPU optimizations included skipping unsampled traces and filtering context before deserialization, recovering 10+ percentage points of overhead.

By Steef-Jan Wiggers

Inside Agoda’s Storefront: a Latency-Aware Reverse Proxy for Improving DNS Based Load Distribution

Leela Kumili — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 14:11:00 GMT

Agoda engineers developed Storefront, a Rust-based S3-compatible reverse proxy that improves load balancing, request routing, and observability across large-scale object storage systems. The proxy addresses DNS-based distribution limitations, implements latency-aware routing, cross-data-center optimizations, IO safeguards, credential-less authentication, and exposes telemetry via OpenTelemetry.

By Leela Kumili