Novalith
News and analysis from the world of production systems.
Zero-Downtime Deployments Without the Drama
May 24, 2026
Narratives surrounding uninterrupted deployments obsess over flashy infrastructure switching and instant green-blue cutovers. Real-world stability relies on mundane mechanics: deep readiness endpoints that confirm functional dependencies, complete socket draining, and backward-compatible persistence layers.
Executing phased schema transitions protects production data from deployment breakage. First append additive database structures, deploy services that synchronize writes across schemas, backfill historical rows, and drop legacy columns in a subsequent release. Every stage can be undone without service disruption.
When to Choose a Queue Over a Request
April 29, 2026
Traditional RPC calls remain popular due to straightforward causality: the client makes an invocation, waits for the response, and monitors latency directly. Asynchronous message queuing becomes essential when background tasks outlast active connections or when sudden volume surges threaten to overw…
Practical Notes on Postgres Connection Pooling
September 2, 2026
Handling PostgreSQL backends imposes substantial overhead because each active client spawns a dedicated process consuming significant RAM, making intermediary connection management mandatory at scale. While session-level pooling preserves compatibility seamlessly, transaction pooling aggressively re…
HTTP/3 and QUIC: What Changed for Operators
August 13, 2026
Relocating the transport layer to userspace and wrapping headers in encryption makes QUIC a privacy milestone that complicates packet capture analysis. Metrics like congestion parameters and stream flow control are no longer readable off raw wire captures without decrypting via session secrets.…
Understanding TLS 1.3 Session Resumption
August 30, 2026
While TLS 1.3 reduced initial connection setup to one round trip, reconnecting clients achieve their largest performance gains through session resumption. Supplying an established pre-shared key allows traffic to bypass negotiation and transmit payload immediately, transforming mobile load times fro…
More reading
- The Operator's Guide to Load Testing — Engineering, June 22, 2026
- Cache Invalidation Patterns That Survive Traffic — Data, September 4, 2026
- A Practical Guide to API Rate Limiting — Engineering, June 3, 2026
About us
Founded by former SREs and network engineers, our editorial desk focuses on the practical side of operating distributed services - less hype, more packet captures.