Engineering Reading

From the Blogs Worth Following. Published every Saturday, here and by RSS.

49 stories 7 issues 7 categories

Architecture Data & ML Infrastructure Performance Reliability Developer Experience Practice & Craft

Top stories

A revisit of remote Spectre attacks on Cloudflare Workers

Cloudflare re-evaluated remote Spectre attacks against its Workers platform to see if newer stabilization techniques pose a threat. The company previously deployed a defense called Dynamic Process Isolation (DyPrIs) to isolate suspicious scripts into separate processes. This post revisits the effectiveness of that defense against modern attack methods.

Why it matters — Dynamic Process Isolation (DyPrIs) can mitigate remote Spectre attacks by identifying malicious-looking scripts and isolating them into separate processes.

Cloudflare · 22 August 2026 · Read the original →

Infrastructure

How a global payment processor preserved AWS RAM shares and Lake Formation permissions during an AWS Organizations migration

This post outlines how to safely migrate AWS accounts between organizations while preserving AWS Resource Access Manager (RAM) shares and Lake Formation permissions. It addresses the challenges of maintaining resource trust boundaries when an account leaves its parent organization.

Why it matters — Migrating AWS accounts across organizational boundaries requires careful sequencing to prevent the automatic revocation of RAM shares and data lake permissions.

AWS Architecture · 29 August 2026 · Read the original →

Performance

Saving another 100TB of RAM with math (and Rust)

Cloudflare shares how they optimized memory usage across their global network of thousands of servers. By leveraging mathematical optimizations and Rust, they managed to reclaim 100TB of RAM from services running on every node.

Why it matters — Even small, node-level memory optimizations yield massive resource savings when multiplied across a global, uniform server fleet.

Cloudflare · 19 September 2026 · Read the original →

Data & ML

Beyond Two Towers: Launching the 3-Tower Engagement Co-Train Model (Part 2)

Pinterest details the architecture and deployment of their 3-Tower Engagement Co-Train Model for lightweight ads ranking. The post covers how they moved beyond traditional two-tower models to improve engagement prediction accuracy.

Why it matters — Adding a third tower to traditional retrieval architectures allows models to co-train on multiple engagement objectives simultaneously.

Pinterest · 19 September 2026 · Read the original →

Reliability

Worker Backpressure (Part 1)

This post details how Canva implemented backpressure mechanisms in their queue worker systems. It explains how they designed workers to automatically slow down ingestion when downstream dependencies fail, and safely ramp back up once those systems recover.

Why it matters — Implementing self-tuning backpressure in queue workers prevents cascading failures and system overload during downstream outages.

Canva · 19 September 2026 · Read the original →

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