Platform Engineering

All Articles (13 articles)

• DRM Fundamentals for Streaming Media

  Platform Engineering / Media Systems 21 min read

  Digital Rights Management (DRM) for streaming media combines encryption, license management, and platform-specific security to control content playback. This article covers the encryption architecture (CENC, AES modes), the three dominant DRM systems (Widevine, FairPlay, PlayReady), license server design, client integration via EME (Encrypted Media Extensions), and operational considerations including key rotation, security levels, and the threat model that DRM addresses.

• Video Transcoding Pipeline Design

  Platform Engineering / Media Systems 18 min read

  Building scalable video transcoding pipelines requires orchestrating CPU/GPU-intensive encoding jobs across distributed infrastructure while optimizing for quality, cost, and throughput. This article covers pipeline architecture patterns, codec selection, rate control strategies, job orchestration with chunked parallel processing, quality validation, and failure handling for production video platforms.

• Web Video Playback Architecture: HLS, DASH, and Low Latency

  Platform Engineering / Media Systems 24 min read

  The complete video delivery pipeline from codecs and compression to adaptive streaming protocols, DRM systems, and ultra-low latency technologies. Covers protocol internals, design trade-offs, and production failure modes for building resilient video applications.

• Image Processing Service Design: CDN, Transforms, and APIs

  Platform Engineering / Media Systems 45 min read

  This document presents the architectural design for a cloud-agnostic, multi-tenant image processing platform that provides on-the-fly transformations with enterprise-grade security, performance, and cost optimization. The platform supports hierarchical multi-tenancy (Organization → Tenant → Space), public and private image delivery, and deployment across AWS, GCP, Azure, or on-premise infrastructure. Key capabilities include deterministic transformation caching to ensure sub-second delivery, HMAC-SHA256 signed URLs for secure private access, CDN (Content Delivery Network) integration for global edge caching, and a “transform-once-serve-forever” approach that minimizes processing costs while guaranteeing HTTP 200 responses even for first-time transformation requests.

• SLOs, SLIs, and Error Budgets

  Platform Engineering / Observability & Reliability 13 min read

  Service Level Objectives (SLOs), Service Level Indicators (SLIs), and error budgets form a framework for quantifying reliability and balancing it against development velocity. This is not just monitoring—it is a business tool that aligns engineering effort with user experience. SLIs measure what users care about, SLOs set explicit targets, and error budgets convert those targets into actionable resource constraints. The framework originated at Google’s SRE practice and has become the industry standard for reliability management. This article covers the design reasoning behind each concept, the mathematics of error budget consumption and burn rate alerting, and the operational practices that make SLOs effective in production.

• CSP Violation Reporting Pipeline at Scale

  Platform Engineering / Observability & Reliability 11 min read

  CSP-Sentinel is a centralized system designed to collect, process, and analyze Content Security Policy (CSP) violation reports from web browsers at scale. The system handles baseline 50k RPS with burst capacity to 500k+ RPS while maintaining sub-millisecond response times and near-zero impact on client browsers.

• Logging, Metrics, and Tracing Fundamentals

  Platform Engineering / Observability & Reliability 13 min read

  Observability in distributed systems rests on three complementary signals: logs capture discrete events with full context, metrics quantify system behavior over time, and traces reconstruct request paths across service boundaries. Each signal answers different questions, and choosing wrong defaults for cardinality, sampling, or retention can render your observability pipeline either useless or prohibitively expensive. This article covers the design reasoning behind each signal type, OpenTelemetry’s unified data model, and the operational trade-offs that determine whether your system remains debuggable at scale.

• Edge Delivery and Cache Invalidation

  Platform Engineering / Infrastructure & Delivery 15 min read

  Production CDN caching architecture for balancing content freshness against cache efficiency. Covers cache key design, invalidation strategies (path-based, tag-based, versioned URLs), stale-while-revalidate patterns, and edge compute use cases—with specific focus on design tradeoffs, operational failure modes, and the thundering herd problem that senior engineers encounter during cache-related incidents.

• Deployment Strategies: Blue-Green, Canary, and Rolling

  Platform Engineering / Infrastructure & Delivery 19 min read

  Production deployment strategies for balancing release velocity against blast radius. Covers the architectural trade-offs between blue-green, canary, and rolling deployments—with specific focus on traffic shifting mechanics, database migration coordination, automated rollback criteria, and operational failure modes that senior engineers encounter during incident response.

• SSG Performance Optimizations: Build, Cache, and Delivery

  Platform Engineering / Infrastructure & Delivery 20 min read

  Production-grade Static Site Generation (SSG) architecture for AWS CloudFront delivery. Covers atomic deployments, pre-compression strategies, Lambda@Edge routing patterns, and Core Web Vitals optimization—with specific focus on design tradeoffs and operational failure modes that senior engineers encounter in production.

• k6 Load Testing Overview: Smoke, Spike, Soak, Stress

  Platform Engineering / Experimentation & Testing 21 min read

  Master k6’s Go-based architecture, JavaScript scripting capabilities, and advanced workload modeling for modern DevOps and CI/CD performance testing workflows.

• Statsig Experimentation Platform: Architecture and Rollouts

  Platform Engineering / Experimentation & Testing 21 min read

  Statsig is a unified experimentation platform that combines feature flags, A/B testing, and product analytics into a single, cohesive system. This post explores the internal architecture, SDK integration patterns, and implementation strategies for both browser and server-side environments.

• E-commerce SSG to SSR Migration: Strategy and Pitfalls

  Platform Engineering / Platform Migrations 24 min read

  This comprehensive guide outlines the strategic migration from Static Site Generation (SSG) to Server-Side Rendering (SSR) for enterprise e-commerce platforms. Drawing from real-world implementation experience where SSG limitations caused significant business impact including product rollout disruptions, ad rejections, and marketing campaign inefficiencies, this playbook addresses the critical business drivers, technical challenges, and operational considerations that make this architectural transformation essential for modern digital commerce.Your marketing team launches a campaign at 9 AM. By 9:15, they discover the featured product shows yesterday’s price because the site rebuild hasn’t completed. By 10 AM, Google Ads has rejected the campaign for price mismatch. This scenario—and dozens like it—drove our migration from SSG to SSR. The lessons learned section documents our missteps—including a mid-project pivot from App Router to Pages Router—that shaped the final approach.