This week’s system design refresher:
LAST CALL FOR ENROLLMENT: Become an AI Engineer - Cohort 5Our 5th cohort of Becoming an AI Engineer starts today, March 28. This is a live, cohort-based course created in collaboration with best-selling author Ali Aminian and published by ByteByteGo.
Here’s what makes this cohort special:
We are focused on skill building, not just theory or passive learning. Our goal is for every participant to walk away with a strong foundation for building AI systems. If you want to start learning AI from scratch, this is the perfect platform for you to begin. 12 Claude Code Features Every Engineer Should Know Load Balancer vs API GatewayLoad balancers and API gateways both sit between your clients and backend servers. But they do very different things, and mixing them up causes real problems in your architecture.
A load balancer has one job: distribute traffic. Clients send HTTP(s) requests from web, mobile, or IoT apps, and the load balancer spreads those requests across multiple server instances so no single server takes all the load. It handles:
An API gateway does a lot more than that. It also receives HTTP(s) requests from the same types of clients, but instead of just forwarding traffic, it controls what gets through and how.
In most production setups, the load balancer and api gateway sit together. The API gateway handles the smart stuff up front, rate limits, auth, routing to the right microservice. Then the load balancer behind it distributes traffic across instances of that service. They're not competing tools. They work best when used together. What is MCP?Model Context Protocol (MCP) is a new system introduced by Anthropic to make AI models more powerful.
It is an open standard (also being run as an open-source project) that allows AI models (like Claude) to connect to databases, APIs, file systems, and other tools without needing custom code for each new integration. MCP follows a client-server model with 3 key components:
MCP has five core building blocks (also known as primitives). They are divided between the client and server.
REST vs gRPCChoosing between REST and gRPC seems simple at first, but it ends up affecting how your services communicate, scale, and even break.
Both are trying to solve the same problem: how services talk to each other. But the way they approach it is different.
You start noticing this difference in performance-heavy systems. JSON is convenient, but Protobuf is built for efficiency.
Streaming becomes really useful when you need real-time updates or long-lived connections.
With gRPC, both client and server come from the same definition, so you run into fewer issues during integration.
Session-Based vs JWT-Based AuthenticationEvery web app needs authentication. But how you manage it after login matters more than most developers realize.
There are two dominant approaches: session-based and JWT-based. They solve the same problem differently. Session-Based Authentication: The user logs in, and the server creates a session and stores it in a session store. The client gets a session_id cookie. On every subsequent request, the browser sends that cookie, and the server looks up the session to validate it. The state lives on the server. That's the key tradeoff. It's simple and easy to revoke, but now your backend has to manage that session store. JWT-Based Authentication: The user logs in, and the server validates credentials, then creates and signs a token using a secret or private key. That token is sent back to the client. On every subsequent request, the client sends it as a Bearer token in the Authorization header. The server verifies the signature and reads the claims. No session store needed. The state lives in the token itself. The server stays stateless, which makes horizontal scaling straightforward. Over to you: what’s your go-to approach for auth in microservices? A Cheat Sheet on The Most-Used Linux CommandsLinux has thousands of commands. Most engineers use about 20 or so commands every day, not because Linux is limited, but because that core set handles the bulk of actual work: navigating files, inspecting logs, debugging processes, checking system health, and fixing things under pressure.
This cheat sheet maps out the most-used Linux commands by category:
Over to you: Which Linux command do you end up using the most during real incidents?
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EP208: Load Balancer vs API Gateway
Saturday, 28 March 2026
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