Oracleon
News and analysis from the world of production systems.
The Hidden Cost of Chatty Microservices
June 16, 2026
Splitting a monolith into services trades local complexity for distributed complexity, and nowhere is that clearer than in fan-out. A request that used to make three function calls now makes three network calls, each with its own timeout, retry policy, and failure mode.
The arithmetic is unforgiving. If each hop has a 99.9% success rate and your request touches ten services, end-to-end success drops below 99%. Users do not experience your architecture diagram - they experience the product of every dependency's reliability.
Zero-Downtime Deployments Without the Drama
July 17, 2026
Popular engineering lore depicts seamless releases through elaborate blue-green switches and instantaneous traffic flips. Production reality centers on disciplined fundamentals: synthetic probes verifying realistic workloads, graceful connection draining on retiring nodes, and database schema mutati…
Reading Latency Percentiles Without Fooling Yourself
June 27, 2026
Mean latency figures obscure the critical tail behavior that quantile measurements highlight. An API exhibiting an average response time of fifty milliseconds can still subject five percent of requests to two-second delays; those unfortunate visitors encountering cold starts, cache misses, and satur…
Understanding TLS 1.3 Session Resumption
August 3, 2026
Shortening the standard handshake to a solitary round trip was an achievement, but session resumption delivers the true speed advantage for returning traffic. Transmitting data right away via pre-shared keys spares high-latency cellular connections the drag of multi-step cryptographic exchanges.…
Managing Secrets Without Losing Sleep
August 6, 2026
There are exactly two ages of secrets management: 'we keep them in an encrypted file' and 'we were audited'. The distance between them is covered by rotation policies, access trails, and the gradual realisation that humans should read production credentials roughly never.…
More reading
- The Operator's Guide to Load Testing — Engineering, June 29, 2026
- Practical Notes on Postgres Connection Pooling — Data, June 24, 2026
- A Practical Guide to API Rate Limiting — Engineering, May 22, 2026
About us
We are a small team of infrastructure engineers and technical writers. We publish what we learn running production systems: incident retrospectives, protocol deep-dives and tooling notes.