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Infrastructure & DevOps

The most popular blog posts about infrastructure & devops on Hacker News. 164 posts.

2020
65

Letsencrypt, the Good, the Bad and the Ugly

Letsencrypt is a pretty neat concept: free secure certificates for web servers, in order to increase the adoption of HTTPS across the web. The basic idea is that certificates should be free, that the barrier to install them should be as low as possible and that updating certificates should be automated. It protects…

68

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…

76

A Nix terminology primer by a newcomer

Maybe I just haven't been paying attention before, but in the last year or so, there seems to have been an increase in discussion around the Nix package manager. This is also what got me to finally try it, and I'm very happy with the results, even if the road is a little bumpy.

80

Run More Stuff in Docker

In 2020, Docker is the best medium for distributing and running most developer-facing software . It’s widely accepted that Docker is great for building and deploying the artifacts for your enterprise web app, but this is less well known when it comes to things like developer tools. However, running tools in containers…

84

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

88

AWS Graviton2

In November of last year, AWS announced the first ARM-based AWS instance type ( AWS Designed Processor: Graviton ). For me this was a very big deal because I’ve been talking about ARM based servers for more than a decade, believing that massive client volumes fund the R&D stream that feeds most server-side innovation…

89

Microservices Considered Harmful (2019)

A recent trend in our industry is the software architecture move from a monolith app to microservices, often with a related blog post explaining how much better everything is after. A recent blog post by neo-bank Monzo explains that they have reached the crazy amount of 1500 microservices (a ratio of ~10 microservices…