1
UK air traffic control meltdown
Some notes about the UK air traffic control meltdown
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Building and operating a pretty big storage system called S3
Three distinct perspectives on scale that come along with building and operating a storage system the size of S3.
3
Production Twitter on one machine? 100Gbps NICs and NVMe are fast
In this post I’ll attempt the fun stunt of designing a system that could serve the full production load of Twitter with most of the features intact on a single (very powerful) machine. I’ll start by showing off a Rust prototype of the core tweet distribution data structure handling 35x full load by fitting the hot set…
4
Squeeze the hell out of the system you have
When complexity leaps are on the table, there’s usually also an opportunity to squeeze some extra juice out of the system you have. By tweaking the workload, tuning performance, or supplement…
5
Making a Linux home server sleep on idle and wake on demand – the simple way
Daniel P. Gross is a computer software and hardware professional based in Toronto.
6
Building an occupancy sensor with a $5 ESP32 and a serverless DB
How I built an occupancy sensor with an ESP32C3, Cloudflare Workers/D1, and Grafana
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Scalability is overrated
Startup founders like to think about scalability—and that’s usually a good thing. But overly focusing on scalability overlooks one of the biggest advantages that startups have over larger companies.
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Most 16-year-olds don't have servers in their rooms
Hi, I’m Varun. I have a server in my room. Actually, I have two of them. And I write a ton of my own code for them. And I love it. This is a story documenting my homelab’s quiet beginnings, its spiralling evolution, and its uncertain future.
9
My Overkill Home Network
In this post I will hopefully detail my entire home network. Some of this has been in separate posts explaining single items, but nowhere do I have all of the network in one post with all the changes since last year. Here is a full shot of the rack in
10
Self hosting in 2023
Why I've decided to host my page on my own in home server and how community is building amazing tools like Coolify.
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How much can you get out of a $4 VPS?
When starting a new project, evaluating the budget needed for cloud hosting can be a tricky question.On one side, you will hear horror stories of people waki...
12
Death by a Thousand Microservices
The software industry is learning once again that complexity kills
13
Knightmare: A DevOps Cautionary Tale (2014)
In the first 45-minutes the market was open the faulty software deployment sent millions of child orders into the market resulting in 4 million transactions against 154 stocks for more than 397 mil…
14
The UK is wasting a lot of wind power
The UK discarded 6% of its windpower last year, at a cost of almost £1bn. What’s going on, and how can we fix it?
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How I run my servers (2022)
I've been writing recently about servers and internet infrastructure 1 . A lot of this writing is predicated on running server software on a VM or physical machine, rather than using a more cloudy solution, which is somewhat unpopular these days. However, I think it's a pretty reasonable way to do things, and it's not…
16
GitHub Actions could be so much better
I love GitHub Actions: I’ve been a daily user of it since 2019 for both professional and hobbyist projects, and have found it invaluable to both my overall productivity and peace of mind. I’m just old enough to have used Travis CI et al. professionally before moving to GitHub Actions, and I do not look back with joy 1…
17
Privacy friendly ESP32 smart doorbell with Home Assistant local integration
Privacy focused “smart” doorbells seem to be few and far between so I decided to build one that integrates with Home Assistant via ESPHome and is easy to build.
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Introduction to Immutable Linux Systems
In this article, you will learn what stands behind the label immutable when it comes to Linux systems
20
Zimaboard: The closest thing to my dream home server setup
I gave in to my impulses and bought myself a small single board computer to be my power-efficient home server, here's how it went.
21
From Go on EC2 to Fly.io
How I switched hosting my Go-based side projects from Amazon EC2 to Fly.io, significantly simplified deployment, and saved a bit of cash while I was at it.
22
Monitoring Is a Pain
And we're all doing it wrong (including me) I have a confession. Despite having been hired multiple times in part due to my experience with monitoring platforms, I have come to hate monitoring. Monitoring and observability tools commit the cardinal sin of tricking people into thinking this is an
23
Docker
Lately I tend to stick to topics that are historic by at least twenty years, and that does have a lot of advantages. But I am supposedly a DevOps professional, and so I will occasionally indulge in giving DevOps advice... or at least opinions, which are sort of like advice but with less of a warranty.
24
OpenTelemetry in 2023
4 Years In, OpenTelemetry Delivers on its Promise for Open Observability
25
7 watts idle – building a low powered server/NAS on Intel 12th/13th gen
Maybe a poem will help remember complicated power-saving settings for SSDs. Here goes. "ALPM for SATA, not N-V-M-e. The latter needs ASPM, and A-P-S-T"....
26
The Reluctant Sysadmin's Guide to Securing a Linux Server
I wrote a follow-up to this guide, which you should probably consider along with this article.
27
Hyperscale in your Homelab: The Compute Blade arrives
This is the Compute Blade, and I'm test driving it in a four-node cluster: I'm testing the Dev version, and @Merocle from Uptime Lab sent four Blades, a 3D-printed 4-bay case (a metal 1U rackmount enclosure is in the works), and two fan modules. He's been testing 40 of these in a rack at Jetbrains for months, and…
28
Building a Personal VoIP System
Take control of your telephony with Asterisk!
29
AWS networking concepts in a diagram
Before March 2023 I couldn’t for the life of me understand what was going on in the AWS VPC dashboard. I mean, look at the length of the scrolling bar on the left-hand panel! So, with the goa…
30
I made my blog solar-powered, then things escalated
In 2020 I wondered if I could run my blog on solar power , being inspired by Low-tech Magazine , doing the same thing (but better) 1 . The answer was 'yes', but only through spring and summer.