Topic
Distributed
Distributed systems fundamentals: consensus, simulation testing, fault injection, reliability engineering, and coordination primitives for large-scale services.
4 posts · ~28 min of reading
Jul 8, 2026
Ring Attention: Distributing Million-Token Contexts Across Devices
How Ring Attention eliminates the memory wall for long-context transformers by overlapping blockwise attention computation with KV-cache communication in a ring topology, enabling near-linear context scaling across devices.
Jul 7, 2026
S3 Conditional Writes: The CAS Primitive That Killed the Coordination Sidecar
For years, every database built on object storage needed a DynamoDB table or a ZooKeeper cluster on the side just to answer "who is the writer?" In late 2024, S3 quietly shipped If-Match and If-None-Match support on PutObject, turning the object store itself into a compare-and-swap register. Here is why that one HTTP header changes how you architect storage systems, and how projects like SlateDB use it for formally verified writer fencing.
Jul 5, 2026
Deterministic Simulation Testing: Finding Distributed Systems Bugs Before They Exist
FoundationDB shipped a distributed database with essentially zero customer-reported bugs by running its entire cluster inside a single-threaded simulation driven by one random seed. TigerBeetle and Antithesis have since pushed the idea further. Here is how deterministic simulation testing works, why a seed is worth a thousand log files, and where the technique's real limits are.
Jul 5, 2026
Two Workloads in a Trench Coat: Prefill/Decode Disaggregation in LLM Serving
Prefill and decode have opposite hardware profiles, and serving them on the same GPUs wastes both. A practical tour of DistServe and Mooncake, the two papers behind the biggest architecture shift in LLM inference.