tag: distributed-systems
articles: 9 · beats: 1
latest: September 1, 2026
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Distributed Systems
9 Crashtech articles on Distributed Systems, filed under System Design, published between July 2026 and September 2026. Every piece is full-text HTML with sources, structured data and an authored FAQ.
All 9 sit in the System Design beat. System Design
Database Replication Explained: Single-Leader, Multi-Leader, and Leaderless
What replication lag actually breaks, and how single-leader, multi-leader, and leaderless models trade off consistency for availability.
The Google Cloud Outage That Started With One Missing Null Check
One unprotected code path in Google Cloud's Service Control took down Spotify, Discord, and Cloudflare auth in minutes. Here's the anatomy of the failure.
When 87% of Your Cache Vanishes
Consistent hashing maps nodes and keys to a circle, so adding a server moves only 1/N of keys instead of almost all of them.
Why Raft Consensus Prevents Split-Brain
Raft ensures only one partition can reach quorum, making split-brain impossible. Writes commit to majorities. Powers etcd and CockroachDB.
Token Buckets: Bounding Rate Limits at the Edge
Fixed-window counters leak at boundaries. Token buckets refill steadily, absorb bursts, and bound the sustained rate strictly—the algorithm Stripe uses.
The CAP Theorem Is Not a Menu
Network partitions force a hard choice: refuse writes (CP) or accept and diverge (AP). Why the two-of-three myth is wrong, and what PACELC really tells us.
Why Raft Won: Consensus Built for Humans
Paxos is correct but hard to understand; Raft made consensus explicit. Same guarantees, different adoption. Why comprehensibility matters in algorithms.
Vector Clocks: Detecting Causality in Distributed Systems
Vector clocks solve distributed ordering: when wall-clock timestamps fail to detect concurrent writes, vector clocks reveal true causality and conflicts.
Operational Transforms vs CRDTs
Why Google Docs needs a server and Figma doesn't: how two competing approaches to concurrent editing resolve the same-string conflict, and when each wins.
Questions we answer about Distributed Systems
- Why do databases replicate data instead of just running on one powerful machine?
- What is replication lag and why does it matter?
- What's the difference between single-leader and multi-leader replication?
- What is split-brain, and why is it dangerous in a replicated database?
- Why would a system choose leaderless replication over single-leader?
- What actually broke during the June 2025 Google Cloud outage?
- Why did a single bug take down so many unrelated services?
- What's a feature flag and why does its absence matter here?
- Why did recovery take almost 3 hours in one region when others recovered in 40 minutes?
- How do you design a system so a bug like this stays contained to one region?
Covered alongside
Frequently asked questions
What does Crashtech publish about Distributed Systems?
9 articles tagged Distributed Systems, the most recent published September 1, 2026. All 9 sit in the System Design beat. Each carries numbered sources, an authored FAQ and full structured data.
What questions about Distributed Systems does Crashtech answer directly?
10 questions have a dedicated answer page under this tag, including “Why do databases replicate data instead of just running on one powerful machine?”. Each answer is authored prose from the article it belongs to, not a generated summary.
Can AI assistants read Crashtech's Distributed Systems coverage?
Yes. Crashtech serves full static HTML to every crawler, allows all major AI user agents in robots.txt, and publishes an llms.txt manifest plus a full-text corpus, so assistants can retrieve and cite these articles directly.