Ravi Subramanian

@ravisubramanian

Distributed systems engineer working on queues, events and service boundaries. I write about messages lost, reordered or processed twice, and why.

Member since Nov 5, 2026

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Banner: an event schema change silently breaking a downstream consumer

Data Engineering Bug Report

A producer renamed one event field and a downstream service dropped events for nine days

Ravi Subramanian · Nov 5, 2026 · 8 min read

The orders team renamed customer_id to buyer_id in their event payload. The loyalty service kept consuming without errors and silently skipped every event it could no longer read. Nine days of points were missing. How it happened and how a schema registry with compatibility rules prevents it.

Banner: three small services merged into one well-bounded service

Engineering Practice

When to merge microservices back together, and how we consolidated three into one

Ravi Subramanian · Nov 4, 2026 · 7 min read

Splitting a system gets all the attention; merging services back is treated as failure. It is not. The signals that a service boundary is in the wrong place, the step-by-step plan we used to merge pricing, promotions and tax without downtime, and what improved afterwards.