Practical articles on AI, DevOps, Cloud, Linux, and infrastructure engineering.
We moved a 60-node production EKS cluster to Auto Mode. Some pain points evaporated, others got harder. The cost picture is more nuanced than the marketing suggests.
We ran the same workload on both for half a year. The break-even point isn't where most blog posts say it is — and the latency story has more nuance than throughput-per-dollar charts admit.
We've been running the OTel Collector at the edge of every cluster for 18 months. The config patterns that lasted, the ones we ripped out, and a few processors that quietly saved us money.
Blue/green is easy for stateless services. We did it for our primary Postgres cluster with 3.2TB of data and ~8k connections. Here's exactly how — and what almost went wrong.
We migrated 47 cron jobs to systemd timers across our fleet. The mechanical conversion was easy. The interesting parts were the bugs we found that cron had been hiding.
We replaced 14 long-lived IAM users with SSO + temporary credentials. The migration plan, the gotchas, and the policies we now enforce.
Six months running RAG in production taught us that the retrieval step matters far more than the model. Concrete techniques that moved the needle, with before/after numbers.
How we shipped three schema migrations with zero customer impact. Expand-then-contract, dual-writes, and the rollback plan we never had to use — but tested anyway.
We were drowning in 200 alerts a week. Most got ignored. After a quarter of triage and rework, we're at about 15 — and on-call actually responds to them.
We had .env files in three repos, AWS keys in Slack DMs, and a postgres password etched into a Confluence page. Cleaning it up took a sprint and changed how we think about secrets.
We wrote pretty postmortems for two years and kept hitting the same incidents. Here's what changed when we started writing ugly ones.
Practical patterns for Terraform modules at scale: versioning, composition, testing, and avoiding the monolith trap.
