/Infrastructure

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


Best Practices For Tagging Your Infrastructure And Applications

- Mallory Mooney tl;dr: Tagging is important for monitoring application data in modern environments. They "unify your metric, log, and trace data so that you can search for hosts and their services and easily move from one data point to another."

featured in #168


How Stripe Invests In Technical Infrastructure (Video)

- Will Larson tl;dr: Prioritization is especially challenging for infrastructure engineers. Will presents his approach as Stripe scaled, discussing when to firefight, work on new features and more.

featured in #164


Successfully Merging the Work of 1000+ Developers

- Jack Li tl;dr: Shopify merge ~400 commits daily and, to do this, built internal tooling - Merge Queue - and by following 3 guidelines. (1) Master must always be green (passing CI) (2) Master must stay close to production (3) Emergency merges must be fast. 

featured in #163


How To Invest In Technical Infrastructure

- Will Larson tl;dr: Playbook on managing technical infrastructure focussing on how to transition from constant firefighting mode to a structured operational framework.

featured in #143