The Growing Pains Of Database Architecture
- Tim Liang tl;dr: “In 2020, Figma’s infrastructure hit some growing pains due to a combination of new features, preparing to launch a second product, and more users - database traffic grows approximately 3x annually.” Tim discusses the infrastructure changes the team implemented.featured in #420
Trunk and Branches Model for Scaling Infrastructure Organizations
- Will Larson tl;dr: Early on in your company’s lifetime, you’ll form your infrastructure organization: a small team of 4-8 engineers. Later on, you'll have 70 engineers across 8-10 teams. Those are both stable organizational configurations. The transition between the small to the large team can be difficult and unstable, and Will provides us with a playbook on how to execute it.featured in #297
Building Infrastructure Platforms
- Poppy Rowse Chris Shepherd tl;dr: "Infrastructure Platform teams enable organizations to scale delivery by solving common product and non-functional requirements with resilient solutions." The 7 key principles that can help you build the right thing are discussed.featured in #296
Don't Make My Mistakes: Common Infrastructure Errors I've Made
- Mat Duggan tl;dr: "Allow me a moment to go back through some of the most disastrous decisions or projects I ever agreed to (or even fought to do, sometimes):" (1) Don't migrate an application from the datacenter to the cloud. (2) Don't write your own secrets system. (3) Don't run your own Kubernetes cluster. Mathew runs through 6 decisions in total, and provides what should have been done for each.featured in #274
Why Secure Access To Cloud Infrastructure Is Painful
- Ev Kontsevoy tl;dr: Secure access to cloud infrastructure doesn't have to be painful. Access Plane consolidates connectivity, authentication, authorization, and audit in one place.featured in #261
Run Code Faster Than The Speed Of Light
tl;dr: Nanos is a Linux binary-compatible unikernel that runs one and only one application in the cloud. Faster and safer than Linux.featured in #241
Solving The Three Stooges Problem
- Rajiv Shah tl;dr: "In this blog post, we’ll talk about how traffic to Reddit’s search infrastructure is reminiscent of The Three Stooges’ doorway sketch, and we’ll outline our approach to remediate these request patterns. We’ll walk through our methodology step-by-step, and we hope that you’ll use it to make your own microservice boundary doorways more resilient to rowdy slapstick traffic."featured in #238
Product Management In Infrastructure Eng
- Will Larson tl;dr: Infrastructure teams have 2 modes of operation: (1) A foundation mode where tasks are mandatory e.g. compliance, security, scaling a popular product. (2) Innovation mode where teams have the flexibility in prioritizing and solving problems - teams have less experience here so Will guides us through the process of problem discovery, prioritization and validation.featured in #237
Type In The Exact Number Of Machines To Proceed
tl;dr: When an enterprise has tooling allowing for changes to many machines simultaneously, by a simple shell command, errors happen. The author finds it helpful to prompt the person, before running the command, to manually enter the exact number of machines that will be affected.featured in #214
Second-guessing The Modern Web
- Tom MacWright tl;dr: The author is skeptical of the current industry trend of building single page React apps with server-side rendering. He discusses the reasons why in this post.featured in #182