- Published on
Adding read replicas is expected to offload the primary database. In practice, coordination costs, consistency guarantees, and hidden coupling can prevent load from moving at all.
Architecture
All Posts
- software-engineering (6)
- distributed-systems (3)
- reliability (3)
- career (3)
- debugging (3)
- systems (3)
- fundamentals (2)
- production-systems (2)
- engineering (2)
architecture (2)
- production (2)
- databases (2)
- performance (2)
- production-incidents (1)
- backend (1)
- foundations (1)
- observability (1)
- problem-solving (1)
- clean-code (1)
- best-practices (1)
- caching (1)
- system-behavior (1)
- timeouts (1)
- cascading-failures (1)
- system-failures (1)
- sql (1)
- scaling (1)
- testing (1)
- Published on
Feature flags reduce deployment risk, but over time they can quietly reshape system behavior in ways that make correctness harder to reason about.