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Observability — Correlating Logs, Metrics, and Traces in Anger
The "three pillars" framing misses the point — what matters is correlating across them. The patterns that earn their place and the tooling decisions that pay back.
The "three pillars" framing misses the point — what matters is correlating across them. The patterns that earn their place and the tooling decisions that pay back.
The architectural choice is presented as binary; the practical answer is "depends on the workload." The patterns that earn their place and the failure modes we've hit.
They solve different problems. RAG injects knowledge; fine-tuning changes behavior. The decision criteria, the hybrid pattern, and what we'd do over.
Default-deny, namespace isolation, egress control — the patterns we use, the gotchas around DNS, and where Cilium changed our calculus.
Sharding isn't just "split the table" — the shard key choice cascades through queries, joins, rebalancing, and operations. The decisions that pay off and the ones we redid.
Most post-mortems produce a document and no follow-through. The format, the discipline, and the cultural moves that actually convert incidents into engineering improvements.
Three discounting mechanisms, three different commitments. The rules of thumb we use to pick, and the mistakes we made before settling on them.
When the service is slow and the network is suspect, these are the tools we reach for, in this order, with the exact flags that find the answer.
Token caching, model routing, prompt compression, and the boring discipline of measuring. The levers that cut our LLM bill 60% without touching feature scope.
pg_upgrade is fast but takes downtime; logical replication lets you cut over while the old DB still serves traffic. The runbook, the gotchas, and the post-cutover checklist.
Horizontal and vertical autoscalers solve different problems and break in different ways. The thresholds, cooldowns, and conflicts we learned the hard way.
Tracking experiments and shipping models are different problems. The MLOps tooling assumes one solution; production splits them. The patterns we use.
Vault + Kubernetes auth + Vault Agent Injector. The setup, the failure modes during pod startup, and the patterns that beat raw Kubernetes Secrets.