Platform Protocols

See how systems move. Remember why.

Swipe up for the next concept, left to go deeper. Keys: ↑↓ concepts · ←→ depth · 1–4 answer.

About

One platform concept at a time, shown moving

Platform Protocols explains how real systems behave. The Journal goes deep on one platform engineering concept per issue. This app lets you predict it, watch it, play with it, and remember it next month.

readThe JournalOne concept per issue, from first principles to production evidence.
doThe LabsRun the mechanism yourself and watch it fail and recover.
see & rememberThis appPredict, watch, play, then review on a schedule.

Every color means one thing

  • Requests and data moving
  • Healthy, success ✓
  • Waiting, queued, slow
  • Failing, overloaded ✗
  • Control: timeouts, breakers, signals
  • Look here

How it works

  1. Daily Incident. One short puzzle a day, the same for everyone: diagnose, name the mechanism, pick the fix. Share your result.
  2. Swipe up for the next concept. Each one opens on something real: an outage, a production system, a published decision.
  3. Swipe left to go deeper, always in the same order: what it is, the problem, first principles, the solution, patterns, anti-patterns, then check yourself.
  4. Recall later. Concepts come back as tests after 1, 3, 7, 21 and 60 days.
  5. Rounds end. The gap before the next review is part of how memory works. One small action a day keeps your streak; freezes cover missed days.

Accuracy rules

Every claim names its source and quotes it where possible. Simulations state their assumptions. Numbers marked illustrative show the shape of a mechanism, not measurements. Daily Incidents are real incidents, simplified and linked to the postmortem, where we have one, and labeled fictional scenarios otherwise.

Sources in the Resilience deck

  1. Google SRE book, “Addressing Cascading Failures”: sre.google
  2. Marc Brooker, “Timeouts, retries, and backoff with jitter”, Amazon Builders’ Library: aws.amazon.com
  3. AWS SDKs and Tools Reference, “Retry behavior”: docs.aws.amazon.com
  4. David Yanacek, “Using load shedding to avoid overload”, Amazon Builders’ Library: aws.amazon.com
  5. GitHub, “The August 17 outage, and the work ahead”: github.blog
  6. Envoy, circuit breakers and retry budgets: envoyproxy.io
  7. gRPC retry design (A6) and guide: github.com/grpc · grpc.io
  8. Martin Fowler, “CircuitBreaker”: martinfowler.com
  9. Azure Architecture Center, “Bulkhead pattern”: learn.microsoft.com
  10. Stripe API reference, “Idempotent requests”: docs.stripe.com
  11. Reactive Streams specification: reactive-streams.org
  12. Vattani, Chierichetti & Lowenstein, VLDB 2015: PDF

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© Saravanakumar Raju · Platform Protocols