microservices

Overview My recent on-call shift was quite the rollercoaster, but yielded valuable insights as usual. One particularly interesting incident was resolved by modifying our Quality of Service configuration for the impacted application pods to Burstable. What does that mean? Well that’s what I’m hoping to address in this writeup as well as better grok it myself. Quick Infra Overview Our backend is divided into various K8s deployments, each with its own allocated resources:...

The Question While working on our checkout service, I noticed that we used JWTs to authorize client side requests. Authorization as opposed to Authentication because these requests are made between services and the client is already authenticated (logged into the platform). A co-worker asked a question about how JWT works and that got me spiraling down the rabbit hole. I knew JWTs were used to tell the backend server that the request being made was made by a trusted party (ie....

Understanding the importance of graceful shutdown in a distributed system