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Marc Brooker

brooker.co.za

2026

Small Decisions: Engineering a Leading Modeloriginal ↗
28 Sept 2026
Lorenz and Little: How Much Does Your Tail Cost?original ↗
29 Jul 2026
Aurora DSQL: Scalable, Multi-Region OLTPoriginal ↗
19 Jul 2026
Meet Alice. Alice is impatient.original ↗
19 Jun 2026
Is this blog written by AI?original ↗
18 Jun 2026
Agentic software development hypothesisoriginal ↗
20 May 2026
What's Easy Now? What's Hard Now?original ↗
18 May 2026
It's time to be right.original ↗
30 Apr 2026
Spec Driven Development isn't Waterfalloriginal ↗
9 Apr 2026
What about juniors?original ↗
25 Mar 2026
My heuristics are wrong. What now?original ↗
20 Mar 2026
Music To Build Agents Byoriginal ↗
18 Mar 2026
SFQ: Simple, Stateless, Stochastic Fairnessoriginal ↗
25 Feb 2026
You Are Hereoriginal ↗
7 Feb 2026
Pass@k is Mostly Bunkoriginal ↗
21 Jan 2026
Agent Safety is a Boxoriginal ↗
12 Jan 2026

2025

On the success of 'natural language programming'original ↗
16 Dec 2025
What Does a Database for SSDs Look Like?original ↗
15 Dec 2025
What Now? Handling Errors in Large Systemsoriginal ↗
20 Nov 2025
Why Strong Consistency?original ↗
18 Nov 2025
DSQL: Simplifying Architecturesoriginal ↗
2 Nov 2025
Fixing UUIDv7 (for database use-cases)original ↗
22 Oct 2025
Is Systems Research Really Just About Making Numbers Bigger?original ↗
12 Oct 2025
Locality, and Temporal-Spatial Hypothesisoriginal ↗
5 Oct 2025
Seven Years of Firecrackeroriginal ↗
18 Sept 2025
Dynamo, DynamoDB, and Aurora DSQLoriginal ↗
15 Aug 2025
LLMs as Parts of Systemsoriginal ↗
12 Aug 2025
Career advice, or something like itoriginal ↗
20 Jun 2025
Systems Fun at HotOSoriginal ↗
2 Jun 2025
Good Performance for Bad Daysoriginal ↗
20 May 2025
Decomposing Aurora DSQLoriginal ↗
17 Apr 2025
One or Two? How Many Queues?original ↗
25 Mar 2025
What Fekete's Anomaly Can Teach Us About Isolationoriginal ↗
5 Feb 2025
Versioning versus Coordinationoriginal ↗
4 Feb 2025

2024

Snapshot Isolation vs Serializabilityoriginal ↗
17 Dec 2024
DSQL Vignette: Wait! Isn't That Impossible?original ↗
6 Dec 2024
DSQL Vignette: Transactions and Durabilityoriginal ↗
5 Dec 2024
DSQL Vignette: Reads and Computeoriginal ↗
4 Dec 2024
DSQL Vignette: Aurora DSQL, and A Personal Storyoriginal ↗
3 Dec 2024
Ten Years of AWS Lambdaoriginal ↗
14 Nov 2024
Garbage Collection and Metastabilityoriginal ↗
14 Aug 2024
Resource Management in Aurora Serverlessoriginal ↗
29 Jul 2024
Let's Consign CAP to the Cabinet of Curiositiesoriginal ↗
25 Jul 2024
Not Just Scaleoriginal ↗
4 Jun 2024
It's always TCP_NODELAY. Every damn time.original ↗
9 May 2024
MemoryDB: Speed, Durability, and Composition.original ↗
25 Apr 2024
Formal Methods: Just Good Engineering Practice?original ↗
17 Apr 2024
Finding Needles in a Haystack with Best-of-Koriginal ↗
25 Mar 2024
The Builder's Guide to Better Mousetrapsoriginal ↗
4 Mar 2024
Better Benchmarks Through Graphsoriginal ↗
12 Feb 2024
How Do You Spend Your Time?original ↗
6 Feb 2024
Pat's Big Deal, and Transaction Coordinationoriginal ↗
23 Jan 2024
What is Scalability Anyway?original ↗
18 Jan 2024

2023

Why Aren't We SIEVE-ing?original ↗
15 Dec 2023
It's About Time!original ↗
27 Nov 2023
Optimism vs Pessimism in Distributed Systemsoriginal ↗
18 Oct 2023
Writing For Somebodyoriginal ↗
21 Sept 2023
Exponential Value at Linear Costoriginal ↗
8 Sept 2023
On The Acoustics of Cocktail Partiesoriginal ↗
25 Aug 2023
Invariants: A Better Debugger?original ↗
28 Jul 2023
My Favorite Bits of OSDI/ATC'23original ↗
13 Jul 2023
Bélády's Anomaly Doesn't Happen Oftenoriginal ↗
23 Jun 2023
What is a container?original ↗
19 Jun 2023
Container Loading in AWS Lambdaoriginal ↗
23 May 2023
Open and Closed, Omission and Collapseoriginal ↗
10 May 2023
The Four Hobbies, and Apparent Expertiseoriginal ↗
20 Apr 2023
Surprising Scalability of Multitenancyoriginal ↗
23 Mar 2023
False Sharing versus Perfect Placementoriginal ↗
7 Mar 2023
Hot Keys, Scalability, and the Zipf Distributionoriginal ↗
7 Feb 2023
NoSQL: The Baby and the Bathwateroriginal ↗
30 Jan 2023
Erasure Coding versus Tail Latencyoriginal ↗
6 Jan 2023

2022

Under My Thumb: Insight Behind the Rulesoriginal ↗
15 Dec 2022
Lambda Snapstart, and snapshots as a tool for system buildersoriginal ↗
29 Nov 2022
Amazon's Distributed Computing Manifestooriginal ↗
22 Nov 2022
Writing Is Magicoriginal ↗
8 Nov 2022
Give Your Tail a Nudgeoriginal ↗
21 Oct 2022
Atomic Commitment: The Unscalability Protocoloriginal ↗
4 Oct 2022
Histogram vs eCDForiginal ↗
2 Sept 2022
What is Backoff For?original ↗
11 Aug 2022
Getting into formal specification, and getting my team into it toooriginal ↗
29 Jul 2022
The DynamoDB paperoriginal ↗
12 Jul 2022
Formal Methods Only Solve Half My Problemsoriginal ↗
2 Jun 2022
What is a simple system?original ↗
3 May 2022
Simple Simulations for System Buildersoriginal ↗
11 Apr 2022
Fixing retries with token buckets and circuit breakersoriginal ↗
28 Feb 2022
Will circuit breakers solve my problems?original ↗
16 Feb 2022
Software Deployment, Speed, and Safetyoriginal ↗
31 Jan 2022
DynamoDB's Best Feature: Predictabilityoriginal ↗
19 Jan 2022

2021

The Bug in Paxos Made Simpleoriginal ↗
16 Nov 2021
Serial, Parallel, and Quorum Latenciesoriginal ↗
20 Oct 2021
Caches, Modes, and Unstable Systemsoriginal ↗
27 Aug 2021
My Proposal for Arecibo: Dronesoriginal ↗
11 Aug 2021
Latency Sneaks Up On Youoriginal ↗
5 Aug 2021
Metastability and Distributed Systemsoriginal ↗
24 May 2021
Tail Latency Might Matter More Than You Thinkoriginal ↗
19 Apr 2021
Redundant against what?original ↗
14 Apr 2021
What You Can Learn From Old Hard Drive Advertsoriginal ↗
25 Mar 2021
Incident Response Isn't Enoughoriginal ↗
22 Feb 2021
The Fundamental Mechanism of Scalingoriginal ↗
22 Jan 2021
Quorum Availabilityoriginal ↗
6 Jan 2021
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