Practical articles on AI, DevOps, Cloud, Linux, and infrastructure engineering.
We had the same 180-line build workflow copy-pasted into 60 repos. Fixing one bug meant 60 PRs. Here's the reusable-workflow setup that made it one.
We moved 40 TB of user media off S3 and cut the bill by 70 percent, mostly by killing egress fees. Here's where R2 won and where we kept S3 anyway.
The top model on the MTEB leaderboard made our search worse and our bill bigger. Here's how we actually picked an embedding model for a real RAG system.
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.
Our overlay tree grew to seven environments and started copy-pasting the same patch into each. Here's the component-based layout that stopped the drift.
Most agents that "need memory" actually need a smaller context window and a database. Here's how we cut a support agent's token bill by 60 percent by deleting memory.
A single NAT Gateway quietly billed us $2,900 in one month, mostly for data processing on traffic that never needed to leave the VPC. Here's how we found it and cut it.
We moved 40 services off the nginx Ingress controller onto Gateway API without a single dropped connection. Here's the routing overlap trick that made it boring.
Everyone says Compose is for dev only. We ran it in production for two years on a single node and it was the right call, until the day it very much wasn't.
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.
We had 140 engineers with 300 static public keys scattered across authorized_keys files nobody could audit. Moving to SSH certificates with short TTLs made access reviewable again.
Our S3 bill tripled in a month with no growth in stored data. The storage line was flat. The cost was in requests and a misconfigured lifecycle rule quietly shredding money.
