181
Static Web Hosting on the Intel N150
Compare static web hosting performance on an Intel N150 using the same nginx.conf across FreeBSD jails, SmartOS zones, NetBSD, OpenBSD and Linux, focusing on HTTP vs HTTPS and TLS CPU usage.
Topics /
Infrastructure & DevOps
The most popular blog posts about infrastructure & devops on Hacker News. 321 posts.
182
Take this on-call rotation and shove it
At some companies, it is expected that certain engineers will serve as part of a formal on-call rotation. On paper, this seems like a reasonable way to ensure the reliability of the product. In practice, it is a miserable burden and you probably won't even get paid for it.
183
Why I run FreeBSD for my home servers (2024)
Why FreeBSD instead of Linux for home servers? Exploring ZFS, jails, stability, and the reasons behind choosing FreeBSD for a home infrastructure.
184
AWS S3 SDK breaks its compatible services
Achieving Data Freedom Through Open Source and Rust
185
Nix Derivation Madness
I’ve written a bit about Nix and I still face moments where foundational aspects of the package system confounds and surprises me.
186
It's five grand a day to miss our S3 exit
We're spending just shy of $1.5 million/year on AWS S3 at the moment to host files for Basecamp, HEY, and everything else. The only way we were able to get the pricing that low was by signing a four-year contract. That contract expires this summer, June 30, so that's our departure date for the final leg of our cloud…
187
I gave up on self-hosted Sentry (2024)
Discover why I gave up on self-hosting Sentry before even starting. The high hardware needs, tricky setup, and heavy maintenance made it not worth the trouble.
188
How the economics of multitenancy work
CI is chaotic, bursty, spiky, and short-lived. That chaos is a nightmare unless you’re built for it. Blacksmith’s serverless CI cloud thrives on unpredictability: more customers = more noise = smoother utilization = lower costs for everyone. Multitenancy isn’t just efficient — it’s profitable. And yes, the margins are…
189
How we reduced the impact of zombie clients
Every night, right around midnight (mainly UTC), a horde of zombies wakes up and clamors for … digital certificates! The zombies in question are abandoned or misconfigured Internet servers and ACME clients that have been set to request certificates from Let’s Encrypt. As our certificates last for at most 90 days…
190
How Container Filesystem Works: Building a Docker-Like Container from Scratch
Learn how Linux containers are built from the ground up. Starting with the mount namespace and a root filesystem, see why PID, cgroup, UTS, and network namespaces naturally follow - and how this foundation makes concepts like bind mounts, volumes, and persistence in Docker or Kubernetes much easier to grasp.
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LetsEncrypt – Expiration Notification Service Has Ended
Since its inception, Let’s Encrypt has been sending expiration notification emails to subscribers that have provided an email address to us via the ACME API. This service ended on June 4, 2025. The decision to end the service is the result of the following factors: Over the past 10 years more and more of our…
193
GitHub Linux ARM64 hosted runners now available for free in public repositories
Now in public preview, Linux arm64 hosted runners are available for free in public repositories. Following the release of arm64 larger hosted runners in June, this offering now extends to…
194
Podman Quadlets with Podman Desktop
Learn how to create & manage and use Quadlets with Podman Desktop
195
2025 Tariff Impacts at Puget Systems
Tariffs have been affecting numerous industries—including ours. This post explains the tariff impact on Puget Systems' pricing and our strategic approach.
196
Linux kernel cgroups writeback high CPU troubleshooting
Read on to learn how we used network packet captures and BPF to debug web server performance, ultimately uncovering a Linux kernel performance issue. This investigation was a collaboration between myself and my colleagues.
197
Case Study: ByteDance Uses eBPF to Enhance Networking Performance
Bytedance, a global technology company operating a wide range of content platforms around the world at massive scale, faced significant challenges in ensuring performance and stability across its data centers. With over a million servers running containerized applications, the company required a networking solution…
198
The DevOps Engineer's Handbook
Rather than technology alone, it's the practices, processes, and culture changes DevOps introduces that can most positively impact your software delivery.
199
Decreasing Certificate Lifetimes to 45 Days
Let’s Encrypt will be reducing the validity period of the certificates we issue. We currently issue certificates valid for 90 days, which will be cut in half to 45 days by 2028. This change is being made along with the rest of the industry, as required by the CA/Browser Forum Baseline Requirements, which set the…
200
Native ACME support comes to Nginx
NGINX and Let's Encrypt share a common vision of an open and secure web. Now, with built-in support for ACME, the world's most popular web server, reverse proxy and ingress controller for Kubernetes can simplify certificate management for everyone. From the home lab to scaled-out, mission-critical enterprise…
201
Preview: Amazon S3 Tables and Lakehouse in DuckDB
We are happy to announce a new preview feature that adds support for Apache Iceberg REST Catalogs, enabling DuckDB users to connect to Amazon S3 Tables and Amazon SageMaker Lakehouse with ease.
202
More than DNS: Learnings from the 14 hour AWS outage
A thorough review of a major cloud outage.
203
A Guide for WireGuard VPN Setup with Pi-Hole Adblock and Unbound DNS
I’ve used Mullvad as my VPN provider for a few years. Their service is good, they provide keys for 5 devices, rely on the Wireguard protocol, and offer alternative configurations as well. Despite that, my needs have changed and I wanted to be able to have granular control over DNS queries and the ability to connect my…
204
Replacing cron jobs with a centralized task scheduler
A brief description of our task scheduling system
205
Serving 200M requests per day with a CGI-bin
In the early 2000s, we used to write a lot of CGI programs. This was the primary way to make websites dynamic at the time. These CGI programs were usually written in Perl, but sometimes in C to increase performance. The CGI mechanism is conceptually simple but powerful. When the web server receives an incoming request…
206
Backblaze Drive Stats for Q3 2025
Read the Q3 2025 Drive Stats report to see the latest annualized failure rates, and an analysis of how we define failure in the first place.
207
I'm Done with Ubuntu
A few busted upgrades and the heavy-handed push of a software packaging solution has ruined Ubuntu for me.
208
How we scaled Slack to support 1000s of developers
Here’s how we built a two-way Slack bridge with full impersonation to deliver white glove support to thousands of Railway developers from our help center.
209
The Canva outage: another tale of saturation and resilience
Today’s public incident writeup comes courtesy of Brendan Humphries, the CTO of Canva. Like so many other incidents that came before, this is another tale of saturation, where the failure mod…
210
Yoke: Infrastructure as code, but actually
Infrastructure as code, but actually