Topics /
Infrastructure & DevOps
The most popular blog posts about infrastructure & devops on Hacker News. 1,839 posts.
Xhyve – Lightweight Virtualization on OS X Based on Bhyve
The Hypervisor.framework user mode virtualization API introduced in Mac OS X 10.10 (Yosemite) cannot only be used for toy projects like the hvdos DOS Emulator, but is full-featured enough to support a full virtualization solution that can for example run Linux.
FreeBSD Jails Containers
FreeBSD networking and containers (Jails) stacks are very mature and provide lots of useful features … yet for some reason these features are not properly advertised by the FreeBSD project &#…
LXD 2.0: Introduction to LXD
Stéphane Graber's website -
Docker Considered Harmful (2016)
A note in advance: This is absolutely not about Docker being too "opinionated" for me, or other tools being more flexible. I believe that learning and using Docker is just plain more complicated than learning and using the tools I describe below. Docker is genuinely more complex and harder to use than the…
Monorepo is great if you're really good
This is inspired by Dan Luu's post on the advantages of a single big repository over many small ones. That post is fairly old, and I confess that I'm hardly up to date on the state of tooling, both for managing multiple repos and for dealing with one big one. But I'm going to make an argument which I think mostly…
Single dependency stacks
Life with Postgres only.
Modern messaging: Running your own XMPP server
Since a years we know, or might suspect, our chats are listend on, our uploaded files are sold for advertising or what purpose ever and the chance our social messengers leak our private data is incredibly high. It is about time to work against this.
The many lies about reducing complexity part 2: Cloud
That standard image that explains the difference between on-premises, IAAS, PAAS, and SAAS in the cloud? You know what, it is hugely misleading. Here is the real deal.
I don't think Elasticsearch is a good logging system
I’ve been a heavy user of ElasticSearch for coming up 7 years now. During that time I’ve used it for a few main usecases: A Search Engine, An APM Solution (after NewRelic started being stupidly expensive), a backend for Jaeger, and as a log storage system. In all of those usecases I’ve really pushed ElasticSearch to…
MinIO Is Dead, Long Live MinIO
MinIO’s repo is officially archived and abandoned. And how AI Agents helped bring it back from the dead. This post explains how a community fork restores the admin console and ships binaries via CI/CD pipeline.
Don't Use Protobuf for Telemetry
Protobuf needs no introduction, but this post argues that you shouldn’t use it for telemetry. The basic premise of this post is that a good telemetry library needs to be lightweight to avoid perturbing the application; inefficient diagnostic tools are self-defeating. Unlike other formats, nested Protobuf messages…
Fast and cheap bulk storage: using LVM to cache HDDs on SSDs
My attempt to create fast and cheap bulk storage by caching HDDs with SSDs on Linux, using standard lvmcache. Contains an introduction to LVM, RAID, and partitioning.
BuildKit: Docker's Hidden Gem That Can Build Almost Anything
Most people know BuildKit as the thing that makes docker build fast. But BuildKit is a general-purpose build framework with a programmable architecture that can produce any artifact, not just container images. Here's how it works and how I used it to build Alpine APK packages.
Replacing Dropbox in favor of DigitalOcean spaces
A few months ago I experimented with DigitalOcean spaces as my backup solutionthat could replace Dropboxeventually.
“Who Should Write the Terraform?”
Working in Cloud Native consulting , I’m often asked about who should do various bits of ‘the platform work ‘.
Libvirt – The Unsung Hero of Cloud Computing (2013)
Place where I write articles, essays and information on topics which interest me, to share with others
Keycloak SSO with Docker Compose and Nginx
A personal code notes blog
Whose code am I running in GitHub Actions?
I wanted to know what third-party code I was using in my GitHub Actions. I was able to use standard text processing tools and shell pipelines to get a quick tally.
Tarsnap: No heartbleed here
There's a few reasons for this. First, the Tarsnap client-server protocol does not use TLS; instead, it uses a protocol which is about 100x simpler (in terms of the number of pages of documentation required to define it). This means there's less code and far fewer edge cases where bugs can lurk without being triggered…
Go: Best Practices for Production Enviroments
Best practices for writing Go code, from the halcyon days of its youth.
Going IPv6 Only
How would the current internet function when you're on a native IPv6 host without any IPv4 instead of using any of the IPv4 workarounds? Find out with a few firewall rules!
I Self-Hosted Llama 3.2 with Coolify on My Home Server
Discover how I transformed an old server into a powerful AI engine, self-hosting Llama 3.2 with GPU acceleration using Coolify. A step-by-step guide.
I discovered caching CDNs were throttling my everyday browsing
Update: 28 Nov 2023 Zen Internet and I have amicably parted ways over this matter. Their technical response has been added to this post.
Running out of disk space in production
A tale about misconfiguring nginx, from adventures in production