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Infrastructure & DevOps
The most popular blog posts about infrastructure & devops on Hacker News. 1,839 posts.
Escaping surprise bills and over-engineered messes: Why I left AWS
Frustrated with AWS's complexity and cost risks, I switched to NearlyFreeSpeech for its prepaid model, ensuring financial control while keeping hosting simple and flexible.
Kubernetes: Make your services faster by removing CPU limits
At Buffer, we’ve been using Kubernetes since 2016. We’ve been managing our k8s (kubernetes) cluster with kops, it has about 60 nodes (on AWS), and runs about 1500 containers. Our transition to a micro-service architecture has been full of trial and errors. Even after a few years running k8s, we are still learning its…
Using ARG in a Dockerfile – beware the gotcha
Learning about the subtle gotcha with ARG and FROM instruction ordering in Dockerfile definitions.
The fastest de-referer service... with AWS Global Accelerator
Yes, hiding HTTP-referers on your outgoing links are still a thing. Even though standards evolved, they rely on your user having a current browser, which is really something outside of your control. Even then, many larger websites have technologies in place to mask the http-referer on outgoing links. This is to avoid…
Quick VPN Setup with AWS Lightsail and WireGuard
How to run your own VPN in the cloud for less than a penny per hour ( $0.007 / hr )
Moving Marginalia to a new server
So the search engine is moving to a new server soon, thanks to the generous grant mentioned recently. If you visit search.marginalia.nu now, it may or may not use the old or new server. It’ll be like this for a while, since I need them both for testing and maintenance type work. I’ll also apologize if this post is a…
Abusing AWS Lambda to make an Aussie search engine
UPDATE 2025-05-19 Somewhat un-suprisingly AWS has closed the loophole that I was exploiting for this https://aws.amazon.com/service-terms/#30._AWS_Lambda and as such compiling data into your lambda …
Why Not ZFS (2021)
ZFS is a hybrid filesystem and volume manager system that is quite popular recently but has some important and unexpected problems.
On the future of free long term support for Linux distributions
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
Cgit, Nginx and Gitolite: A Personal Git Server
Hi'ya I'm Bryan, and this is my collection of projects, ideas, thoughts, feelings, opinions, ramblings, concepts, concerns, notions, conclusions, blurbs, and schemes, to name a few.
Clog: Making a homegrown ClickHouse log for $20 a month
There was recently a discussion on Hacker News around application logging on a budget. At work I've been trying to keep things lean, not to the point of absurdity, but also not using a $100 or $1000/month setup, when a $10 one will suffice for now . We settled on a homegrown Clickhouse + PHP solution that has…
Switching to Fedora Silverblue
For the last 10 years or so, Arch Linux has been my Linux distribution of choice. The early years were a bit rough, and the process of moving to systemd wasn't without its challenges either, though the experience has improved dramatically since then. In spite of these improvements, certain issues persisted, such as…
I wish systemd logged information about the source of “transactions”
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
Comparing AWS Lambda ARM64 vs. x86_64 Performance Across Runtimes in Late 2025
See how AWS Lambda arm64 stacks up against x86_64 in real-world benchmarks across CPU, memory, and I/O workloads using Node.js, Python, and Rust.
Setting up a Raspberry Pi with 2 Network Interfaces as a simple router
I needed a very basic 'Internet sharing' router setup with one of my Raspberry Pis, and I thought I'd document the setup process here in case I need to do it again. I should note that for more complex use cases, or where you really need to worry about security and performance, you should use something like OpenWRT…
About adding a static route to my DOCSIS modem
You may think this is an easy task but let’s find out. One would expect such functionality in a web interface …
The utilization of 44/8: the reason I mapped IPv4 and IPv6
In the early days, when the Internet was just beginning, back in 1981, radio amateurs were allocated, by what is now known as IANA , an IPv4 block for usage and experimentation by all members of this hobby, internationally. This block was 44.0.0.0/8, which is a huge amount of address space by today’s standards, but…
The End of Localhost
All the Cloud's A Staging Env, and All the Laptops Merely Clients
Docker Compose Isn't Enough
Docker Compose solves real problems in getting applications deployed. It causes problems when deploying many applications. We can do better.
I can't recommend serious use of an all-in-one local Grafana Loki setup
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…