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Infrastructure & DevOps

The most popular blog posts about infrastructure & devops on Hacker News. 276 posts.

2026
246

Launching Route 53 Files

Four decades ago, when the Berkeley Internet Name Domain Server launched, it stored DNS records in "zone files". You could edit these files in vi , but BIND had to be told to reload them before your changes took effect. Later, other DNS servers came along, like Daniel Bernstein's tinydns, which served records directly…

255

Flat Datacenter Networks at Scale at Amazon

The research roots of finding “optimal routing” networks trace back to the late 1970s. Mathematicians defined special kinds of networks called “expanders“. These are graphs with strong connectivity properties guaranteeing no subset of vertices can be isolated from the rest. In 1976, Leslie Valiant gave one of the…

259

Bidirectional charging during grid outages

David asked a great question on my solar battery system post: why buy a small battery just for emergencies when electric cars have a large battery you can also use for other things? [1] This would be great, and seems like the obvious way for it to work: when the grid goes down the panels can charge the car when it's…

261

Zero downtime migrations at petabyte scale (2024)

Data migrations are a critical part of the database lifecycle, and are sometimes necessary for version upgrades, sharding, or moving to a new platform. In many cases, migrations are painful and error-prone. In this article, we walk through how migrations are performed at PlanetScale, and offer advice on how to improve…

264

Coding Agent VMs on NixOS with Microvm.nix

I have come to appreciate coding agents to be valuable tools for working with computer program code in any capacity, such as learning about any program’s architecture, diagnosing bugs or developing proofs of concept. Depending on the use-case, reviewing each command the agent wants to run can get tedious and…