Kubernetes
Environment Config Overlays for Kubernetes
One config that differs per environment is where drift starts. Base plus overlay keeps dev, staging, and prod honest without duplicating manifests.
All writing
Archive
45 articles and counting.
Distributed Systems
GDPR Deletion in Event-Driven Systems
Deleting a user across many services is a fan-out problem with a nasty twist: what your deletion event means. Requested or executed changes everything.
Distributed Systems
Kafka Partitions, Retention, and Compaction
Three Kafka settings decide throughput, cost, and whether replay works: partition count, retention, and cleanup policy. How to choose each deliberately.
Distributed Systems
Kafka Topic Naming and Governance
Ad-hoc Kafka topics become an unnavigable mess. A naming convention plus a single canonical registry keeps an event bus legible as it grows past 50 topics.
Distributed Systems
The Transactional Outbox Pattern
Writing to your database and publishing an event are two operations that can't share a transaction. The outbox pattern fixes that, and when to skip it.
Engineering Strategy
Alerts That Don't Wake You at 3 AM
Most on-call pain is bad alerts, not bad systems. Alert on symptoms users feel, page only on what needs a human now, and kill the rest. The rules.
Distributed Systems
Structured Logging at Scale
Plain-text logs are ungreppable at scale. Structured logging makes logs queryable, but volume and cost bite back. How to log structured, useful, and affordable.
Engineering Strategy
SLOs and Error Budgets That Hold Up
An SLO you never enforce is a number on a wiki. How to set SLOs from user experience, turn them into an error budget, and actually act on the burn rate.
Distributed Systems
OpenTelemetry Sampling Strategies
Tracing everything is too expensive; tracing 1% randomly drops the traces you need. OpenTelemetry sampling strategies, head vs tail, and how to choose.
Distributed Systems
Taming Prometheus Cardinality
High-cardinality labels are what kill Prometheus, not query volume. What causes a cardinality explosion, how to spot it, and the label rules that prevent it.
Kubernetes
Do You Actually Need a Service Mesh?
A service mesh gives mTLS, traffic control, and observability, at real complexity cost. When a mesh is worth it, when it isn't, and the lighter alternatives.
Kubernetes
PodDisruptionBudgets That Actually Protect You
A PodDisruptionBudget keeps your service up during node drains and upgrades, but a wrong value blocks drains or protects nothing. How to set PDBs correctly.