Practical articles on AI, DevOps, Cloud, Linux, and infrastructure engineering.
Edge runtimes look like Node but aren't. Here's what actually breaks — CPU caps, no filesystem, no TCP sockets — and how we route around it.
The three big clouds are closer on list price than the sales decks suggest. Where they actually diverge is discounts, egress, and Windows licensing.
We've run both in production for years. Here's the honest split on pricing traps, tracing quality, and which one you actually want for your team size.
We ran secrets three different ways across AWS, GCP, and Vault. External Secrets Operator gave us one Kubernetes-native workflow. Here's the setup and the gotchas.
Moving our fleet from x86 to Graviton promised 20% savings. We got 31%, but only after fixing native dependencies, a broken base image, and one nasty perf regression.
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.
Least privilege fails when it's a one-time audit that locks things down until something breaks, then gets reverted. The iterative, log-driven approach that tightens permissions safely — and the policies we stopped writing by hand.
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.
Three discounting mechanisms, three different commitments. The rules of thumb we use to pick, and the mistakes we made before settling on them.
Three caching patterns, three failure modes. The one we use most, the one that bit us, and the rule that decides which pattern fits which workload.
There are two hard problems in computer science." We've worked on the cache-invalidation one for a while. The patterns that hold up at scale and the ones that look clean and aren't.
We use Step Functions for batch processing, document ingestion, and a few agentic workflows. The patterns that work, the limits we hit, and where we'd reach for something else.
