I’m Ruslan Tolkachev. I help engineering teams ship and operate database-heavy systems that don’t fall over at scale. MySQL, PostgreSQL, Kafka, Elasticsearch, and Redis in production, and the operational discipline around them.

Every database works fine at hello world. The engineering starts when it needs to scale.

Most of what I do is one of three things. An architecture review on a system that’s about to scale, migrate, or replatform. A post-incident pattern analysis when the same shape of failure keeps recurring on the same surface. Or a sanity check on an AI/LLM rollout against a production database before the demo turns into a post-mortem.

The work behind that is data modeling, query performance, tuning, replication, consistency, transactions, storage engines, and everything around them — provisioning, deployment, observability, SLOs, disaster recovery, the operational maturity to tie it all together. Architecture decisions mean nothing without people who understand them, operate them, and make them better over time. So the engagements that work end up being half about systems and half about the team that owns them.

What you’ll find on this blog:

• Scaling databases beyond hello world - modeling, performance, and operational patterns
• Resilient infrastructure end to end - from provisioning to disaster recovery
• AI + engineering teams - what changes, what doesn’t, and what gets harder
• Production patterns - what works, what breaks, and why

If something here matches a problem you’re working on, send it over. I read every email and I reply to all of them.