Top posts

Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 341 posts.

Infrastructure & DevOps
2021
303

Emacs Tramp over AWS SSM APIs

Cattle not pets The majority of AWS EC2 I need to operate these days are members of Kubernetes clusters. For remote access to them I’m more commonly authenticating to the Kube API to spawn a privileged ephemeral debugger pod rather than accessing the host directly. I have little need for host access even for the…

315

EC2 Boot Time Benchmarking

Once I finished writing ec2-boot-bench, the natural next step was to run some tests — in particular, to see how FreeBSD compared to other operating systems used in EC2. I used the c5.xlarge instance type and tested FreeBSD releases since 11.1-RELEASE (the first FreeBSD release which can run on the c5.xlarge instance…

323

What’s in a package

There is no shortage of package managers. Each tool makes its own set of tradeoffs regarding speed, ease of use, customizability, and reproducibility. Guix occupies a sweet spot, providing reproducibility by design as pioneered by Nix , package customization à la Spack from the command line, the ability to create…

329

Back to Linux

Background Note: I’ve started writing this article about one year ago (September 2020), but I dropped it at some point. Its final version is way less ambitious than my original plans for it, mostly because I forgot some of things that were on mind back then. Still, better than nothing. A long time ago (in 2011) I…