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.
#reliability
7 articles
Kubernetes
The Kubernetes Deployment Checklist
A production Kubernetes deployment checklist: resource limits, probes, rollout strategy, PodDisruptionBudgets, graceful shutdown, and the items teams skip.
Engineering Strategy
Incident Postmortems for Staff Engineers
A blameless incident postmortem fixes the system, not the person. The structure, the root-cause discipline, and the action items that actually get done.
Distributed Systems
Backpressure Design for Real-Time Systems
Backpressure keeps real-time systems alive under load by making producers slow down instead of drowning consumers. Strategies, tradeoffs, and a checklist.
Distributed Systems
Timeout Budgets Across Service Chains
A timeout budget is one deadline split across a service chain so the whole request fails fast instead of piling up doomed work. How to set and propagate it.
Distributed Systems
Idempotency Keys for Distributed Systems
Idempotency keys make retried requests safe so a timed-out payment or duplicate POST applies exactly once. The design, storage, and TTL decisions that matter.
Kubernetes
Readiness Probes That Don't Lie
Most Kubernetes readiness probes lie: they return 200 because the process started, not because the service can serve. How to write probes that tell the truth.