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Infrastructure & DevOps

The most popular blog posts about infrastructure & devops on Hacker News. 1,839 posts.

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1081

Who's on call?

Implementation of an on-call policy requires answering precisely these questions: who is responsible for on-call duties for an application/service, and how is that responsibility defined? More succinctly, who owns on-call? 

1082

DIY out-of-band management: remote power button

I was pleasantly surprised by how easy it was to make it possible to push a PC’s power button remotely via MQTT by wiring up an ESP32 microcontroller, a MOSFET, a resistor, and a few jumper wires. While a commercial solution like IPMI offers many more features like remote serial, or remote image mounting, this DIY…

1088

Falling for Kubernetes

I default to bare metal where I can. But recently I had to adopt a more complicated server management solution. And after a couple months of building for kubernetes, I must admit I'm falling for it more every day.

1090

How I like to install NixOS (declaratively)

For one of my network storage PC builds, I was looking for an alternative to Flatcar Container Linux and tried out NixOS again (after an almost 10 year break). There are many ways to install NixOS, and in this article I will outline how I like to install NixOS on physical hardware or virtual machines: over the network…

1092

A brief look at FreeBSD

Recently I've been playing around with FreeBSD in a virtual machine. The reason for this is that (if all goes well) some time in December my new Framework laptop will arrive, replacing my current X1 Carbon that is starting to show signs of old age (e.g. a keyboard where certain keys don't always work). Framework in…

1095

Heartbeats in Distributed Systems

In distributed systems, one of the fundamental challenges is knowing whether a node or service is alive and functioning properly. Unlike monolithic applications, where everything runs in a single process, distributed systems span multiple machines, networks, and data centers. This becomes even glaring when the nodes…

1100

Making my first embedded Linux system

End-to-end documentation of a journey from no PCB experience to fabricating my own Linux-ready system that can boot the latest mainline kernel. This article is the recommended reading for someone building their first embedded Linux board. F1C100s SoC is used for this sample board.

1107

SRE Doesn’t Scale

We encounter a lot of organizations talking about or attempting to implement SRE as part of our consulting at Real Kinetic. We’ve even discussed and debated ourselves, ad nauseam, how we can apply it at our own product company, Witful. There’s a brief, unassuming section in the SRE book tucked away towards the tail…

1108

Kubernetes at Home with K3s

It’s been a while on the blog! I promise there will be more regular updates from now on, but maybe not always about tech… But why I know what you’re thinking - Kubernetes? On a home server? Who’d be that crazy? Well, a while ago I’d agree but a few things have changed my mind recently…