Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 4,377 posts.
Starting at 1342 UTC today we experienced a global outage across our network that resulted in visitors to Cloudflare-proxied domains being shown 502 errors (“Bad Gateway”). The cause of this outage was deployment of a single misconfigured rule within the Cloudflare Web Application Firewall (WAF)
Written pieces, talks, and other bits by Zach Holman.
How I chose parts, built, and configured my first custom home storage server.
NOTE June 2026: Hetzner announced over 100% increases in prices. They will honour old prices for instances built before June 15th 2026, but for new instances the performance/price ratios show below are no longer valid.
As our customers increasingly adopt containers to run their workloads, we saw a need for a Linux distribution designed from the ground up to run containers with a focus on security, operations, and manageability at scale. Customers needed an operating system that would give them the ability to manage thousands of…
If you need a basic NAS and don't care about GUI features, it is suprisingly simple to set up a ZFS dataset and share it over the network using Samba.
We're excited to announce Network Service Tiers Alpha , making Google Cloud Platform (GCP) the first major public cloud to offer a tiered cloud network. We let you optimize for performance by choosing Premium Tier, which uses Google’s global network with unparalleled quality of service, or optimize for cost, using the…
How I switched hosting my Go-based side projects from Amazon EC2 to Fly.io, significantly simplified deployment, and saved a bit of cash while I was at it.
A large amount of fantastic open source software originates from “scratching an itch”. Such was the case with Firecracker . In 2014, Amazon launched AWS Lambda as a “serverless” compute platform: Users can provide a function — say, ten lines of Python code — and Lambda provides all of the infrastructure between an…
If you’ve ever spent ages waiting for an Ansible playbook to get through a bunch of tasks so yours can be tested, then this article is for you.
How Infisical migrated from MongoDB to PostgreSQL.
And we're all doing it wrong (including me) I have a confession. Despite having been hired multiple times in part due to my experience with monitoring platforms, I have come to hate monitoring. Monitoring and observability tools commit the cardinal sin of tricking people into thinking this is an
How I used Docker Compose, Ansible, and Caddy to re-over-engineer my network setup for easier maintenance, treating my Raspberry Pi like cattle, not a pet.
On behalf of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, I’m excited to announce the GA release of gRPC-Web, a JavaScript client library that enables web apps to communicate directly with backend gRPC…
About a year ago, Hetzner launched the AX162 server line. It offered better price / performance than its predecessor, AX161. We were very excited to adopt it, but we soon encountered serious reliability issues. We observed that the new servers had 16 times higher annual failure rates.
The Grafana 7.0 release is full of major new features and enhancements. Find out all the details here.
GitHub Container Registry introduces easy sharing across organizations, fine-grained permissions, and free, anonymous access for public container images
We’ve launched dozens of applications on Firebase, utilized nearly every facet of the platform, and designed a playbook for scaling gracefully. Suffice it to say, it’s proven an invaluable tool for K-Optional Software. As recently as March 2022, our developers were cheering innovations like Firebase Extensions…
Infrastructure code lessons from a HashiConf 2018 talk by Gruntwork, with the video, the slides, and a condensed written version of five key takeaways.
In my position I probably shouldn’t have a favorite AWS product, just like you shouldn’t have a favorite child. I do have a fave service but fortunately I’m not an (even partial) parent; so let’s hope that’s OK. I’m talking about Amazon Simple Queue Service , which nobody ever calls by its full name.
Since I started working with Snowden’s documents, I have been using a number of tools to try to stay secure from the NSA. The advice I shared included using Tor, preferring certain cryptography over others, and using public-domain encryption wherever possible. I also recommended using an air gap, which physically…
Yesterday, one of our customers let us know about significant performance issues they have experienced on Heroku. They raised an important issue and I want
N2D VMs are the first AMD-based instances on Google Cloud.
So you've heard of this thing called cgroups, and you are interested in finding out more. Perhaps you caught mention of it while listening to a talk abou...
