Cloud
Autoscaling Policies That Actually Work Under Real Traffic
Why naive CPU-based autoscaling fails under real traffic patterns, and the metric choices and tuning that make autoscaling respond correctly instead of thrashing.
3 min read
Tag
Infrastructure
15 articles
Cloud
VPC Networking Fundamentals Every Developer Should Actually Know
A practical walkthrough of VPC networking concepts, from subnets and route tables to security groups, aimed at developers who deploy but don't design networks.
3 min read
DevOps
The Three Pillars of Observability, and Where They Actually Overlap
Logs, metrics, and traces are usually taught as separate pillars, but the real value comes from how they connect during an actual incident investigation.
3 min read
Cloud
Managed Kubernetes: What the Provider Actually Does for You
EKS, GKE, and AKS all promise to take Kubernetes operations off your plate, but the actual division of responsibility is narrower than most teams assume.
3 min read
DevOps
Blue-Green vs Canary Deployments: Choosing the Right Rollout Strategy
A concrete comparison of blue-green and canary deployment strategies, including the infrastructure they each require and where one clearly beats the other.
3 min read
Pinterest
Moving Pinterest's Fleet to Kubernetes
How Pinterest migrated thousands of services onto Kubernetes and built internal platform abstractions so product teams didn't need to become infrastructure experts.
3 min read
DevOps
Secrets Management Approaches in Modern Infrastructure
A comparison of secrets management patterns, from environment variables to dedicated vaults, and how to pick the right one without overengineering a simple app.
2 min read
Cloud
Multi-Region Architecture Trade-offs Nobody Puts on the Slide
Multi-region architecture is sold as pure resilience, but the real trade-offs around data consistency, latency, and operational cost rarely make it into the pitch.
3 min read
DevOps
Terraform State Management Best Practices
Why Terraform state is the most fragile part of most infrastructure setups, and the locking, backend, and workspace patterns that keep it from becoming a liability.
3 min read
Cloud
Cloud Cost Optimization Tactics That Don't Sacrifice Reliability
Concrete cloud cost optimization tactics, from rightsizing to commitment discounts, ranked by effort versus savings so you know where to start.
2 min read
DevOps
CI Pipeline Caching Strategies That Actually Save Time
Practical caching techniques for CI pipelines, from dependency caches to Docker layer caches, and how to avoid the stale-cache bugs that undo the savings.
3 min read
DevOps
Helm Charts: Values, Templates, and the Gotchas That Bite in Production
A practical look at how Helm's values and templating actually resolve, plus the recurring mistakes that turn a simple chart into a debugging session.
2 min read
Airbnb
SmartStack: Airbnb's Early Answer to Service Discovery
Before service meshes existed, Airbnb built SmartStack — Nerve and Synapse plus local HAProxy — to make service discovery reliable during its microservices split.
3 min read
Cloud
S3 and Object Storage Design Patterns That Scale
Key design patterns for using S3-style object storage well, from key naming schemes to lifecycle policies, and the mistakes that cause throttling at scale.
2 min read
DevOps
Kubernetes Liveness, Readiness, and Startup Probes, Explained Properly
The difference between liveness, readiness, and startup probes in Kubernetes, and the common misconfigurations that cause restart loops and dropped traffic.
2 min read