All 21 articles, sorted alphabetically
Anycast architecture
Deep-dive on anycast: announcing one prefix from many PoPs, BGP path selection and catchment behavior, health-gated withdrawal as the drain mechanism,…
Read article →BGP
How BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) routes traffic between autonomous systems that make up the internet.
Read article →CDN Architecture
How CDNs (Content Delivery Networks) place content close to users via distributed edge caches.
Read article →Connection pooling architecture
Deep-dive on connection pooling: why reuse and — more importantly — concurrency limiting matter against a finite backend, the acquire path and its thr…
Read article →Linux conntrack architecture
Deep-dive on nf_conntrack: the 5-tuple hash table, reply tuples and NAT bindings, per-state timeouts as the real capacity knob, table-full drops vs ev…
Read article →eBPF and XDP
Deep-dive on eBPF and XDP: sandboxed verified kernel programs, the verifier and JIT, XDP earliest-hook packet processing, maps for kernel-user state, …
Read article →ECMP routing architecture
Deep-dive on ECMP: how routers spread flows across equal-cost paths with a stateless header hash, next-hop groups and resilient hashing, flowlet switc…
Read article →Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN) architecture
Deep-dive on ECN, the mechanism that lets the network signal congestion by marking packets instead of dropping them: an ECN-capable router experiencin…
Read article →gRPC Architecture in Depth
A 2500-word walkthrough of gRPC architecture: HTTP/2, Protobuf, stubs, interceptors, four RPC patterns, load balancing, deadline propagation.
Read article →Happy Eyeballs architecture
Deep-dive on Happy Eyeballs (RFC 8305): why sequential IPv6-then-IPv4 fallback stalls users, concurrent AAAA/A resolution, address interleaving and RF…
Read article →Multipath TCP architecture
Deep-dive on Multipath TCP: MP_CAPABLE/MP_JOIN subflow establishment, dual sequence numbers (subflow SEQ and connection-level DSN), the path manager a…
Read article →NAT traversal -- connecting peers behind NATs
Deep-dive on NAT traversal: the NAT problem for P2P, STUN public-address discovery, hole punching, TURN relay fallback, cone vs symmetric NAT types, I…
Read article →NTP -- keeping clocks in sync across a network
Deep-dive on NTP (Network Time Protocol): the synchronized-time need, the stratum hierarchy, offset and round-trip-delay estimation, gradual clock dis…
Read article →Path MTU Discovery architecture
Deep-dive on Path MTU Discovery: how a sender emits full-size don't-fragment packets and shrinks when a smaller link returns …
Read article →RDMA architecture
Deep-dive on RDMA: the verbs API and queue pairs, memory registration and kernel bypass, one-sided remote read/write and the completion queue, and the…
Read article →Service Mesh Architecture in Depth
A 2500-word walkthrough of a modern service mesh: sidecar proxies, control plane, mTLS, traffic policy, config distribution, and observability.
Read article →SRv6 architecture
Deep-dive on SRv6: the Segment Routing Header and segments-left, SID structure as locator:function, endpoint behaviors (End, End.X, End.DT4/6), flex-a…
Read article →TCP Fast Open architecture
Deep-dive on TCP Fast Open: how a per-destination cryptographic cookie lets a client carry request data in the SYN for a zero-RTT open, how cookies ar…
Read article →TCP/IP
How TCP/IP layers work: IP for packet routing, TCP for reliable streams, and where they fit versus UDP.
Read article →VXLAN architecture
Deep-dive on VXLAN overlays: encapsulation and the 24-bit VNI, VTEP data path, EVPN Type-2/Type-3 routes, ARP suppression, MAC mobility, BUM replicati…
Read article →WireGuard architecture
Deep-dive on WireGuard: static-key identity and cryptokey routing, the 1-RTT Noise IK handshake, ChaCha20-Poly1305 transport with anti-replay, the tim…
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