Orlaxis
Independent coverage of infrastructure, networking and data practice.
A Practical Guide to API Rate Limiting
April 18, 2026
Few infrastructure components are treated with as much casual oversight as traffic throttling. Simple IP-based token buckets fall apart the moment traffic traverses cellular NAT gateways, causing thousands of legitimate handsets to suffer collective penalties for a single neighbor's surge.
Adopting a multi-tiered topology provides far better resilience: coarse perimeter filtering, authenticated per-user allocations at the service layer, and backend breakers designed to shed incoming volume before storage exhausts. Each stage isolates a specific concern with unique trade-offs.
The Operator's Guide to Load Testing
September 6, 2026
Load tests fail to predict production for a consistent reason: the traffic shape is wrong. Uniform random requests against one endpoint tell you about that endpoint. The production killer is the burst of clients retrying in sync after a thirty-second blip, or the cache-cold crawl at 5 a.m. when the …
When to Choose a Queue Over a Request
July 11, 2026
Synchrony is the default because it is legible: caller asks, callee answers, latency is obvious. Queues enter the picture when 'answer later' is either required - the work outlives the request - or protective, smoothing a spiky workload into something your database can digest.…
The Hidden Cost of Chatty Microservices
June 24, 2026
Refactoring centralized code into independent microservices trades code complexity for network unpredictability. Workflows that previously triggered simple internal methods suddenly require coordinated remote requests, each introducing separate latency budgets, retry loops, and partition hazards.…
Reading Latency Percentiles Without Fooling Yourself
August 30, 2026
Averages conceal what percentiles reveal: the request mix's tail. A service averaging fifty milliseconds can still be sending one in twenty users through a two-second odyssey, and those users - the ones hitting the cold paths, the expired sessions, the overloaded shard - are the ones filing the tick…
More reading
- Zero-Downtime Deployments Without the Drama — Operations, July 17, 2026
- Cache Invalidation Patterns That Survive Traffic — Data, July 9, 2026
- Structuring DNS for Reliability — Networking, April 26, 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.