Beyond CRUDs https://beyondcruds.com Learn distributed systems by building them in Go. Free guide covering Kafka internals, Raft consensus, Serf gossip, log replication, and storage engines — from scratch. en-us Database Indexes Deep Dive — From B-Trees to LSM Trees https://beyondcruds.com/blog/db_indexes https://beyondcruds.com/blog/db_indexes A comprehensive guide to database indexing: hash indexes, B-Trees, clustered vs non-clustered, covering, composite, partial, full-text, spatial indexes in MySQL/PostgreSQL, and how LSM-based engines like Cassandra and CockroachDB index data. Thu, 28 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT How the Kafka Producer Works — And Why It's So Fast https://beyondcruds.com/blog/kafka_producer https://beyondcruds.com/blog/kafka_producer A deep dive into the Kafka producer internals: batching, compression, filesystem optimisation, acknowledgement modes, and the tuning knobs that matter. Thu, 08 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT Kafka Broker Internals — Segments, Indexes, and Log Compaction https://beyondcruds.com/blog/kafka_broker https://beyondcruds.com/blog/kafka_broker How the Kafka broker stores data on disk: log segments, sparse offset and time indexes, physical directory layout, retention, and log compaction. Thu, 29 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT Kafka Consumers & Consumer Groups — Pull Model, Partition Assignment, and Rebalancing https://beyondcruds.com/blog/kafka_consumer https://beyondcruds.com/blog/kafka_consumer How Kafka consumers work: the pull-based model, consumer groups, partition assignment strategies, the rebalancing protocol, offset management, and tuning parameters. Thu, 19 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT Kafka Replication — ISR, Leader Election, and KRaft https://beyondcruds.com/blog/kafka_replication https://beyondcruds.com/blog/kafka_replication How Kafka replicates data across brokers: the ISR protocol, leader election, follower fetch loop, unclean election trade-offs, and a deep dive into KRaft — Raft epochs, leader election, fetch-based log replication, the metadata log, and snapshots. Thu, 12 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT Kafka Internals — Wire Protocol, Data Encoding, and the RecordBatch Format https://beyondcruds.com/blog/kafka_encoding https://beyondcruds.com/blog/kafka_encoding How Kafka encodes data on the wire and on disk: the RecordBatch v2 format, varint encoding, message format evolution, compression framing, and schema management with Schema Registry. Thu, 02 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT