Practical articles on AI, DevOps, Cloud, Linux, and infrastructure engineering.
The Backstage demo always wows leadership. Then six months later the catalog has 400 stale entries and nobody trusts it. Here's what got ours to actually stick.
We inherited 200-odd AWS resources built by hand over four years, with no state file anywhere. Here's how import blocks and a generation workflow got them under Terraform without a rebuild.
A single ALTER TABLE took a lock and stalled every write for 40 seconds during peak traffic. Expand-contract is how we stopped shipping outages.
Adding a read replica cut primary load 60%, then support tickets rolled in about users not seeing their own edits. Replication lag turned into a correctness bug we had to route around.
The dashboard said the database was fine. It wasn't. Here's how pg_stat_statements found the query eating 40% of our Postgres CPU.
A 900GB events table where every query scanned four years to read one day. Range partitioning by month cut our dashboard queries from 8s to under 200ms.
A 40GB index on a 6GB table was the first sign. Queries were fine until they weren't. Here's how we found the bloat and cleared it with zero downtime.
State drift is silent until a deploy fails or an outage reveals it. The scheduled plan-and-diff pipeline that surfaces console hotfixes and manual edits while they're still cheap to reconcile.
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.
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.
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.
The single most useful Postgres extension you might not be using. The queries it surfaces, the indexes it implies, and the operational discipline of reading it weekly.
