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A few ops lessons we all learn the hard way (2020)
Ops is hard. What have learned so far?
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 1,839 posts.
Infrastructure & DevOps
Any year
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From 30 to 230 Docker containers per host
I could not find much information on the interwebs how many containers you can run per host. So here are mine and the issues we ran into along the way.
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Making a micro Linux distro (2023)
A guide on building a simple Linux distribution from scratch. Detailed guide on building the kernel and the init process. Finally, a little distribution is built with u-root that is capable of connecting to the Internet.
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Cloud services like AWS or Google Cloud Platform may be the wrong choice
Why choosing a popular cloud service, like AWS or Google Cloud Platform, may be the wrong choice for you and what to do instead.
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AWS Fired the One Employee Who Gave a Damn
Remember Tarus Balog, the AWS employee who rescued my deleted account when nobody else would? AWS just fired him. His proudest accomplishment in four years was saving my data. Leadership didn't care. The finale of a trilogy nobody asked for.
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Home Lab Hardware Guide
My home lab in a 12U rack as of March 2026. What is a Home Lab? Think of a home lab as a place where you can fail in the privacy of your own home. As
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Build a Container Image from Scratch
Build a Container Image from Scratch — Danish Prakash
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Economics of Orbital vs. Terrestrial Data Centers
Before we get nerd sniped by the shiny engineering details, ask the only question that matters. Why compute in orbit? Why should a watt or a flop 250 miles up be more valuable than one on the surface? What advantage justifies moving something as mundane as matrix multiplication into LEO?
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10Gb/s Ethernet: switching to a Broadcom SFP+ module
As predicted by several people, one of my Marvell-based SFP+ modules had overheating problems. I've switched it over to a Broadcom-based one, and it looks better, though I can't be certain.
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Maersk, Me and NotPetya
Maersk is the world’s largest integrated shipping and container logistics company.
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FreeBSD on the Raspberry Pi
How to install FreeBSD on a Raspberry Pi, one step in building an Active Directory server with Samba and FreeBSD.
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XFaaS: Hyperscale and Low Cost Serverless Functions at Meta
This is one of several papers I’ll be reading from 2023’s Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP). If you’d like to receive regular updates as soon as they’re published, check out my newsletter or follow me on the site formerly known as Twitter . Enjoy!
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Raspberry Pi KVMs Compared: TinyPilot and Pi-KVM v3
In a strange coincidence, the authors of TinyPilot and Pi-KVM both emailed me within a week of each other and asked if I'd be interested in one of their KVM devices. Michael Lynch, founder of Tiny Pilot, said he'd used some of my Ansible work in building the TinyPilot update system, and Maxim Devaev, of Pi-KVM, liked…
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Why I Enjoy PostgreSQL – Infrastructure Engineer's Perspective
Why I enjoy PostgreSQL - Infrastructure Engineer's Perspective
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Netboot Windows 11 with iSCSI and iPXE
Notes on installing and netbooting Windows 11 over iSCSI
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Faktory, a new background job system
Yesterday I explained how a good background job framework is critical to scaling business applications. Today, meet Faktory. I’ve spent the last six months building Faktory, a new background job system which aims to bring the best practices developed over the last five years in Sidekiq to every programming language…
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Docker on MacOS is slow and how to fix it
Note 05/01/2025: Hello there, you can find an update version of this article here, with the latest findings, improvements and new tools. This is how a Docker container feels inside a macOS environment: lost at sea, far from the coast. With this article I will try to bring this poor container safely to the coast. TL;DR…
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I used AWS cognito for a startup. I wouldn't do it again
I let AWS Cognito gaslight me for three weeks so you don't have to. Here's the unfiltered autopsy.
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Testing a Cheap ExpressCard to NVMe SSD Adapter on My ThinkPad T430
I got curious about an ExpressCard to NVMe M.2 NGFF adapter I saw on Reddit, so I got one to try out myself, ending up with a total of 4 SSD-s on my ThinkPad T430. Yes, four.
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Static Web Hosting on the Intel N150
Compare static web hosting performance on an Intel N150 using the same nginx.conf across FreeBSD jails, SmartOS zones, NetBSD, OpenBSD and Linux, focusing on HTTP vs HTTPS and TLS CPU usage.
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My solar-powered and self-hosted website
How I built a solar-powered, self-hosted website with a Raspberry Pi to explore sustainable, local-first web hosting.
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Crafting container images without Dockerfiles
Last month I have been developing a Rust tool to create container images from Conda environments, without going through Docker. It was a wild trip down the rabbit hole of OCI images, so I thought I’d share part of the adventure here. Enjoy! But why? If you are used to building container images, you might be asking…
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Linux Observability with BPF
Why BPF and XDP are something you should learn.
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AWS and their billions in IPv4 addresses
Earlier this week, I was doing some work on AWS and wanted to know what IP addresses were being used. Luckily for me, AWS publishes this all here https://ip-ranges.amazonaws.com/ip-ranges.json. When you go through this list, you’ll quickly see that AWS has a massive asset
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Cutting down AWS cost by $150k per year simply by shutting things off
Cloud cost optimization at scale part 1: how we save approx 150k USD a year by simply shutting things off