InfoQ - Distributed Systems

Instacart Builds Blueberry, an AI-Powered Assistant to Help On-Call Engineers Investigate Incidents

Leela Kumili — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 14:34:00 GMT

Instacart introduced Blueberry, an AI-assisted incident response system that helps on-call engineers investigate production issues faster. It combines AI agents, operational data, and historical incident knowledge to generate grounded root cause hypotheses in Slack. It uses parallel subagents, MCP integrations, and incident history to reduce investigation time while keeping engineers in control.

By Leela Kumili

JioHotstar Explains the Distributed Engineering behind Personalized Ad Requests at Streaming Scale

Leela Kumili — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 14:09:00 GMT

JioHotstar explains the distributed architecture behind its real-time ad request workflow, covering ad decisioning, waterfall tiering, pacing algorithms, latency optimization, and service coordination required to select and deliver personalized advertisements during streaming playback at scale.

By Leela Kumili

Cloudflare Introduces Meerkat for Strongly Consistent Global Coordination

Renato Losio — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 06:17:00 GMT

Cloudflare recently introduced Meerkat, an internal globally consistent control-plane service based on the QuePaxa consensus algorithm. Unlike Raft, it allows leaderless writes while preserving strong consistency, improving availability across Cloudflare's global network.

By Renato Losio

Presentation: Parting the Clouds: the Rise of Disaggregated Systems

Murat Demirbas — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 13:50:00 GMT

Murat Demirbas discusses the shift toward disaggregated cloud database architectures driven by cloud economics. He explains how decoupling compute from storage enables elastic scaling, cost efficiency, and fault isolation. He shares how classical Paxos roles foreshadowed disaggregation, while analyzing network tradeoffs, shared-memory evolution, and self-assembling database designs.

By Murat Demirbas