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Networking and edge
anycast-edge
anycast edge network
Cloudflare edge
System
Techniques · 18
Primitives · 63
anycast-edge
Config distribution
distributed · medium: A control plane pushes versioned resource changes over long-lived streams; each node validates, ACKs or NACKs and keeps its last good copy, so a bad change stops at a canary.
›
Deterministic simulation testing
distributed · medium: Run the whole system in one thread under a seeded scheduler with simulated network, disk and clock, so every failure replays from its seed.
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Primary-backup replication
distributed · medium: One node orders all writes and ships them to standbys; the acknowledgement rule (none, one, all) sets what a crash loses, and an external arbiter decides who takes over.
›
QUIC
networking · medium: Encrypted, multiplexed transport over UDP with 1-RTT setup, independent streams and connection migration; the transport of HTTP/3.
›
Coverage-guided fuzzing
security · medium: Mutate inputs, run an instrumented target, and keep any input that reaches a new code edge; feedback turns blind guessing into incremental search.
›
Tls termination
security · medium: Terminate TLS at a proxy: SNI cert selection, session resumption, OCSP, kTLS offload (listed in Moved to the wiki)
Point-in-time recovery
storage · medium: Periodic base backups plus a continuously archived change log let you rebuild the state as of any instant, then branch from there.
›
Health checking
systems · low: Decide per backend whether to route to it using probes and real-traffic errors, with consecutive-count hysteresis, capped ejection and a panic fallback.
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Hdr histogram
data-structures · low: Log-linear bucketed histograms with bounded relative error for latency percentiles
Process supervision
hardware-os · low: A parent process starts services, reaps their exits and restarts them under a delay and burst-limit policy, then stops them with SIGTERM before SIGKILL.
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Anycast
networking · low: Announce one IP prefix from many sites over BGP; routing sends each client to its preferred site, and a failed site leaves by withdrawing the route.
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Bgp
networking · low: BGP sessions, UPDATE messages, path attributes and best-path selection
Direct server return
networking · low: Load balancer forwards only inbound packets; backends reply to clients directly
Ecmp
networking · low: Equal-cost multipath: hash flows across next hops; resilient hashing on changes
Geodns routing
networking · low: Answer DNS queries by client location/latency/health (EDNS client subnet)
Maglev hashing
networking · low: Consistent hashing into a fixed prime-size lookup table filled by per-backend permutations; O(1) lookups, near-perfect balance, little disruption on backend changes.
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Packet encapsulation
networking · low: IP-in-IP, GRE, GUE, VXLAN and Geneve tunnelling headers and MTU effects
Syn cookies
networking · low: Stateless SYN handling that encodes connection state in the initial sequence number
Mutual TLS
security · low: TLS where the client also proves a certificate key, so every connection carries a verified, rotatable machine identity.
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Graceful draining
systems · low: On a termination signal, stop taking new work, finish in-flight work until a deadline, tell clients to reconnect elsewhere, then exit; clients resume from a token.
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Delta encoding
compression · low: Store differences between consecutive values instead of the values, turning sorted IDs, timestamps and counters into small numbers that pack into few bits.
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Message sequence numbers
distributed · low: A per-stream counter on every message lets the receiver detect loss, duplicates and reordering, ack cheaply and resume after reconnect with "send from N".
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Grpc protocol
networking · low: GRPC framing over HTTP/2: unary and streaming RPCs, deadlines, status
+ 11 more techniques
+ 47 more primitives
System
Techniques · 18
Primitives · 63
anycast-edge
Config distribution
distributed · medium: A control plane pushes versioned resource changes over long-lived streams; each node validates, ACKs or NACKs and keeps its last good copy, so a bad change stops at a canary.
›
Deterministic simulation testing
distributed · medium: Run the whole system in one thread under a seeded scheduler with simulated network, disk and clock, so every failure replays from its seed.
›
Primary-backup replication
distributed · medium: One node orders all writes and ships them to standbys; the acknowledgement rule (none, one, all) sets what a crash loses, and an external arbiter decides who takes over.
›
QUIC
networking · medium: Encrypted, multiplexed transport over UDP with 1-RTT setup, independent streams and connection migration; the transport of HTTP/3.
›
Coverage-guided fuzzing
security · medium: Mutate inputs, run an instrumented target, and keep any input that reaches a new code edge; feedback turns blind guessing into incremental search.
›
Tls termination
security · medium: Terminate TLS at a proxy: SNI cert selection, session resumption, OCSP, kTLS offload (listed in Moved to the wiki)
Point-in-time recovery
storage · medium: Periodic base backups plus a continuously archived change log let you rebuild the state as of any instant, then branch from there.
›
Delta debugging
compilers · medium: Ddmin minimization of failing inputs or change sets
Fault injection
distributed · medium: Inject latency, errors, kills and partitions via proxies, netem or hooks
Watch notifications
distributed · medium: A store numbers every write; clients list at revision R, then watch from R+1 and receive an ordered change stream with no gap, no duplicate, and a resume point.
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Acme protocol
security · medium: Automated TLS certificate issuance and renewal via ACME HTTP-01/DNS-01 challenges
Key rotation
security · medium: Rotating keys without downtime: key ids, overlap windows, re-wrapping, JWKS publication, revocation
TLS 1.3
security · medium: The standard encrypted, authenticated transport; one round trip, only forward-secret AEAD suites, and little left to misconfigure.
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ARIES recovery
storage · medium: Three-pass crash recovery (analysis, redo, undo) for steal/no-force buffer pools; repeats history, then rolls back losers with compensation log records.
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Envelope encryption
security · medium: Encrypt each object with its own data key and wrap that key under a KMS-held key, so rotation re-wraps 60 bytes and deleting a key shreds data.
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Syscall interception
security · medium: Intercept syscalls via ptrace, seccomp user notify or a user-space kernel
Buffer pool
storage · medium: The database's own page cache (frames, page table, pin counts, dirty bits, replacement) so it, not the OS, controls eviction, write order and I/O.
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MVCC
storage · medium: Keep timestamped versions of each row so readers see a consistent snapshot without blocking writers; the default concurrency control in modern databases.
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Health checking
systems · low: Decide per backend whether to route to it using probes and real-traffic errors, with consecutive-count hysteresis, capped ejection and a panic fallback.
›
Hdr histogram
data-structures · low: Log-linear bucketed histograms with bounded relative error for latency percentiles
Process supervision
hardware-os · low: A parent process starts services, reaps their exits and restarts them under a delay and burst-limit policy, then stops them with SIGTERM before SIGKILL.
›
Anycast
networking · low: Announce one IP prefix from many sites over BGP; routing sends each client to its preferred site, and a failed site leaves by withdrawing the route.
›
Bgp
networking · low: BGP sessions, UPDATE messages, path attributes and best-path selection
Direct server return
networking · low: Load balancer forwards only inbound packets; backends reply to clients directly
Ecmp
networking · low: Equal-cost multipath: hash flows across next hops; resilient hashing on changes
Geodns routing
networking · low: Answer DNS queries by client location/latency/health (EDNS client subnet)
Maglev hashing
networking · low: Consistent hashing into a fixed prime-size lookup table filled by per-backend permutations; O(1) lookups, near-perfect balance, little disruption on backend changes.
›
Packet encapsulation
networking · low: IP-in-IP, GRE, GUE, VXLAN and Geneve tunnelling headers and MTU effects
Syn cookies
networking · low: Stateless SYN handling that encodes connection state in the initial sequence number
Mutual TLS
security · low: TLS where the client also proves a certificate key, so every connection carries a verified, rotatable machine identity.
›
Graceful draining
systems · low: On a termination signal, stop taking new work, finish in-flight work until a deadline, tell clients to reconnect elsewhere, then exit; clients resume from a token.
›
Delta encoding
compression · low: Store differences between consecutive values instead of the values, turning sorted IDs, timestamps and counters into small numbers that pack into few bits.
›
Message sequence numbers
distributed · low: A per-stream counter on every message lets the receiver detect loss, duplicates and reordering, ack cheaply and resume after reconnect with "send from N".
›
Grpc protocol
networking · low: GRPC framing over HTTP/2: unary and streaming RPCs, deadlines, status
Cooperative scheduling
concurrency · low: Green threads/coroutines yielding at await points on a user-space scheduler
Record replay
distributed · low: Record every nondeterministic input (time, randomness, I/O, model and tool outputs, per-tick player input) and re-execute deterministically for debugging, replays and state rebuild
PRNGs (PCG, xoshiro)
numerics · low: Small, fast, statistically strong non-cryptographic generators: PCG32 and xoshiro256**, with seeding, parallel streams and unbiased ranges.
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Leases
distributed · low: A lock that expires on its own: bounded-time ownership that survives crashes and partitions, given bounded clock drift and fencing tokens on writes.
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Write-ahead log
storage · low: Append each change to a checksummed sequential log and fsync it before touching data pages; the basis of crash durability in nearly every database.
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BBR congestion control
networking · low: Model-based congestion control that paces at the measured bottleneck bandwidth and caps inflight near one BDP, instead of reacting to loss.
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Path mtu discovery
networking · low: PMTUD and PLPMTUD to size packets for tunnels without fragmentation
Selective repeat arq
networking · low: Selective-repeat ARQ with windows, status reports and in-order reassembly
AEAD (AES-GCM, ChaCha20-Poly1305)
security · low: Authenticated encryption that encrypts and detects tampering in one call; the only kind of symmetric encryption you should use.
›
Code coverage instrumentation
compilers · low: Insert counters into compiled code to record which blocks, edges or lines ran; a spanning tree of the control-flow graph cuts the counters needed.
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Fast hash functions
data-structures · low: Non-cryptographic hashes built from 64×64→128-bit multiplies and xor-shifts; pick by key size, trust level and whether the hash is persisted.
›
Sanitizers
security · low: ASan/UBSan/TSan shadow memory and instrumentation to catch memory bugs
X509 certificates
security · low: Certificate chains, path validation, SANs, revocation and short-lived issuance
Object storage
cloud · low: S3-compatible blob storage at cents per GB-month with 11 nines durability; pick by egress price, request price and latency, not by storage price alone.
›
Copy on write snapshots
storage · low: Point-in-time snapshots by sharing pages/extents and copying only on write
Failure bisection
search-sort · low: Binary search over commits, batches or inputs to isolate a failure
Transparent interception
networking · low: Redirect traffic to a local proxy (iptables TPROXY/REDIRECT, eBPF) without app changes
DNS message format and client looku…
networking · low: Binary query/response format of DNS (RFC 1035) and how a stub client uses it: record types, name compression, UDP/TCP/EDNS sizes, TTL caching.
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HTTP/1.1 message parsing
networking · low: Parse HTTP/1.1 requests and responses incrementally from a byte stream: RFC 9112 body-length rules, chunked decoding and the strictness that stops request smuggling.
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ECDSA signatures
security · low: The elliptic-curve signature standardised in FIPS 186-5 (P-256) and used by secp256k1 ledgers; 64-byte signatures, but a repeated or biased nonce leaks the private key.
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JSON Web Token (JWT)
security · low: A signed, URL-safe token carrying claims; the verifier's job is the checklist (pinned algorithm, key by kid, exp, aud, iss), not the format.
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Secrets management
security · low: Keep keys and passwords out of code and logs, give workloads short-lived identity instead of static keys, and make rotation routine.
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Cron scheduling
systems · low: Cron expression parsing and next-fire-time computation, with catch-up and time-zone rules
Cryptographic hashes (SHA-2, BLAKE3)
security · low: Collision-resistant fingerprints of data; SHA-256 for interoperability, BLAKE3 for speed, HMAC/HKDF for keyed uses.
›
ECDH key exchange (X25519, P-256)
security · low: Each side multiplies the other's public curve point by its own scalar and both get the same point; always validate the peer key and run the result through a KDF.
›
HKDF key derivation (extract-and-ex…
security · low: HMAC-based two-step key derivation: extract a uniform pseudorandom key from any secret, then expand it into as many context-bound keys as you need.
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Aes key wrap
security · low: AES Key Wrap (RFC 3394/5649) and AES-GCM-SIV for deterministic, authenticated wrapping of key material
Csprng
security · low: OS-backed cryptographically secure random numbers (getrandom), and when a fast PRNG is not enough
Ebpf
hardware-os · low: Verified in-kernel programs on hooks (kprobes, XDP, tc) with maps
Ptrace process control
hardware-os · low: Ptrace: attach, read and write registers and memory, single-step, intercept signals
Seccomp bpf
security · low: Syscall filtering with seccomp BPF programs
fsync, O_DSYNC and O_DIRECT
hardware-os · low: What fsync, fdatasync, O_DSYNC, O_DIRECT and F_FULLFSYNC really guarantee on Linux and macOS, and the exact call sequences for crash-safe files.
›
LRU and CLOCK
systems · low: LRU evicts the least recently used entry via hash map plus linked list; CLOCK approximates it with a reference bit, so hits take no lock.
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S3-FIFO
systems · low: Three FIFO queues (small, main, ghost) that evict one-hit wonders quickly and keep reused objects; low miss ratios with no list moves on hits.
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Control-flow graph
compilers · low: Split a linear instruction list into basic blocks and connect them by jumps; the graph every optimizer, SSA builder and dataflow pass walks.
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Bit packing and PFOR
compression · low: Store blocks of integers with exactly b bits each and patch rare outliers separately (PFOR); the fastest integer codec family, billions of values per second.
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Varint (LEB128)
compression · low: Variable-length integers in 7-bit groups with a continuation bit; small numbers take 1 byte, the wire format of Protobuf, WebAssembly and DWARF.
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d-ary heap
data-structures · low: Array heap with d children per node (d = 4 typical): half the binary heap's depth, siblings in one cache line, faster priority queues.
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Fencing tokens
distributed · low: A number that grows with every lock grant and is checked by the protected resource, so a paused ex-holder's late write is rejected.
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BFS and DFS
graphs · low: The two basic graph traversals; BFS gives hop distances and levels, DFS gives discovery/finish order for cycles, components and topological order.
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Minimum spanning tree
graphs · low: Cheapest set of edges connecting all vertices; Kruskal sorts edges and joins components with union-find, Prim grows one tree, Boruvka merges in parallel rounds.
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Union-find
graphs · low: Disjoint-set forest with union by size and path compression; merges sets and answers same-set queries in effectively constant time.
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CRC32C checksums
hardware-os · low: The Castagnoli CRC-32 with dedicated instructions on x86 (SSE4.2) and ARMv8. It is the standard fast integrity check for storage blocks, logs and network frames.
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SIMD programming
hardware-os · low: Process 4-16 lanes per instruction with AVX2, AVX-512 or NEON via Rust std::arch, with runtime dispatch and a portable fallback.
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Sparse matrices (CSR)
numerics · low: Compressed sparse row stores only nonzeros as row pointers, column indices and values; SpMV streams them once, so it is memory-bandwidth bound.
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Constant time code
security · low: Writing secret-dependent code without branches or memory lookups on secrets; constant-time compare and select
OAuth 2 and OpenID Connect
security · low: Delegated authorization (OAuth 2) and login on top of it (OIDC); use authorization code + PKCE for every user-facing client.
›
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