Distributed systems are rarely built in one clean leap. They evolve through compromises, deadlines, partial rewrites and decisions made with incomplete information. Documentation often captures what was built, but almost never why it was built that way- or what broke along the way.
Distributed Systems Field Notes is a collection of essays drawn from building and operating production systems across IaaS, SaaS and data-intensive platforms. I focus less on ideal architectures and more on the realities of shipping software: trade-offs, constraints and the second-order effects that only surface once users, data and failure modes arrive.
The series covers topics such as:
- Service boundaries and control planes
- Containerization and OCI image packaging
- Event-driven and message-based architectures
- Multi-tenancy and isolation strategies
- Deployment models and operational simplicity
- Patterns that held up under pressure—and those that didn’t
Most examples are grounded in real products I’ve worked on, including infrastructure platforms, applied AI systems and multi-tenant SaaS. Names and details may change, but the architectural pressures remain the same.
This is not a tutorial series. You won’t find step-by-step guides or “best practices” divorced from context. Instead, these field notes aim to document decision-making in motion: what seemed reasonable at the time, what failed later and what I would do differently with hindsight.
If you’re building systems that need to survive growth, team changes, and real operational load, I hope these notes save you a few painful lessons - or at least help you recognize them earlier.