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The most popular blog posts about infrastructure & devops on Hacker News. 1,839 posts.
Notes from Facebook's Developer Infrastructure at Scale F8 Talk
Any time Facebook talks about technical matters I tend to listen. They have a track record of demonstrating engineering leadership in several spaces. And, unlike many companies that just talk, Facebook often gives others access to those ideas via source code and healthy open source projects. It's rare to see a company…
FreeBSD/EC2 on C5 instances
Ever since the first EC2 instances launched — the ones which were retrospectively named "m1.small" — Amazon has relied on the Xen hypervisor. No longer: C5 instances use KVM. This sounds like it would be a problem, but in fact that change didn't bother FreeBSD at all: Now that everything uses hardware-based paging…
A log/event processing pipeline you can't have (2019)
Let me tell you about the still-not-defunct real-time log processing pipeline we built at my now-defunct last job. It handled logs from a la...
Cloudflare outage should not have happened
[BROKEN LINK: blog/google-cloud-s-outage-should-not-have-happened-and-they-seem-to-be-missing-the-point-on-how-to-avoid-it-in-the-future.pre-processed.org], another global IT outage happened (dèjá vu strikes again in our industry). This time at cloudflare(Prince 2025). Again, taking down large swaths of the internet…
Don't send to Gmail over IPv6
Yes, some people do it, and yes, for some people, it works fine. But..... If you're standing up a new server and it has an IPv6 IP address, ...
Yocto, RockPi and SBOMs: Building modern embedded Linux images
TLDR: I wanted to generate an up-to-date disk image for a Rock Pi 4 using Yocto that included CUPS and Docker to both get a better understanding of Yocto …
The Ops Identity Crisis
A big theme in the keynotes and conversation during Velocity Conf in NYC a few weeks ago was the role of ops in an "ops-less" and "server-less" world. It's also been a big feature in discussions on twitter and in conversations I've had with coworkers and friends in the industry.
Goodbye Docker: Purging Is Such Sweet Sorrow
This was triggered by a recurring incident I faced where the Docker daemon was using 100% CPU on multiple cores that made the host effectively unusable.
Building a freedom-friendly WiFi pocket-router (2020)
Daniel Kulesz's personal website
Rolling your own minimal embedded Linux for the Raspberry Pi
Introducing a series of articles on building a custom Linux installation for the Raspberry Pi, for appliance applications.
IoT Nixie Tubes
Every day I make a cup of coffee, organize a list of the things I want to do that day, and try to work through it. Every time I finish one of the tasks, I mark it as complete. By the end of the day, ideally there are no things left on the list, but if there are, I’ll move them into a backlog and start fresh the next…
Free static websites with SSL for hackers
Note: GitLab Pages now fully integrate with Let’s Encrypt , making this post obsolete.
Tmpfs inode corruption: introducing inode64
A few months ago I got a report from a service owner that their service was crashing when trying to access certain files stored in tmpfs. This service provid...
Bash HTTP Monitoring Dashboard
Published: 27-12-2020 | Last update: 11-01-2021 | Author: Remy van Elst | Text only version of this article
AWS Nitro System
At Tuesday Night Live with James Hamilton at the 2016 AWS re:Invent conference, I introduced the first Amazon Web Services custom silicon. The ASIC I showed formed the foundational core of our second generation custom network interface controllers and, even back in 2016, there was at least one of these ASICs going…
Announcing Notqmail
Running my own email server has its challenges. Chief among them: my favorite mail-server software hasn’t been updated since I started using it in 1998.
Running a Certificate Transparency log
Maybe you, yes you, should run a Certificate Transparency log. It’s cheaper, easier, and more important than ever.
HomeLab #1: MikroTik as a Home Router
Proceed at your own risk! (... it's worth it)
In Praise of Alpine and APK
Since the change of year, I’ve been using Alpine Linux on my main computing device (a new desktop PC that I assembled in December). These are some notes on in, some niceties and caveats.
Anti-patterns when building container images
This is a list of recurring anti-patterns that I see when I help folks with their container build pipelines, and suggestions to avoid them or refactor them into something better.
GitHub Actions Are a Problem
A blog, mostly about programming
My 2023 all-flash ZFS NAS (Network Storage) build
For over 10 years now, I run two self-built NAS (Network Storage) devices which serve media (currently via Jellyfin) and run daily backups of all my PCs and servers. In this article, I describe my goals, which hardware I picked for my new build (and why) and how I set it up.
301 redirects: a dangerous one way street (2012)
Best practice has it that when you move content around for whatever good reasons you have that you should do it using a 301 redirect.
Keycloak with PostgreSQL on Kubernetes
In this article we will learn how to deploy Keycloak with PostgreSQL on Kubernetes. We will first do everything manually with separate YAMLs and then later with Helm. Our k8s environment will run i…
A robots.txt Problem
To prevent a part of our web application from being scanned by search engines and other web crawlers, we add a robots.txt like User-agen...