[ 402.193284] nvidia-uvm: Loaded the UVM driver in 8 module load mode. [ 402.201112] NVRM: GPU at PCI:0000:01:00: GPU-8f2a1c5b-3d4e-5f6a-7b8c-9d0e1f2a3b4c [ 405.881203] torch.cuda.OutOfMemoryError: CUDA out of memory. Tried to allocate 48.00 GiB (GPU 0; 80.00 GiB total capacity; 72.12 GiB already allocated; 1.88 GiB free; 74.00 GiB reserved in total by PyTorch) [ 405.881245] File “/opt/conda/lib/python3.10/site-packages/torch/nn/modules/module.py”, … Read more

Stop Treating Your Docker Image Like a Virtual Machine It was 3:14 AM on a Tuesday when the first PagerDuty alert fired. I was the lead SRE for a fintech startup, and we were scaling our transaction processing engine to handle a sudden spike in volume. I had just “optimized” our CI/CD pipeline by caching … Read more

POST-MORTEM AND MANIFESTO: THE 72-HOUR DEATH MARCH Document ID: PM-2024-05-12-PROD-COLLAPSE Status: Bitter. Author: Senior SRE (On-call since Tuesday, currently vibrating from caffeine toxicity) I’m writing this because if I don’t, the “DevOps Transformation Committee” will spin this as a “learning opportunity” in their next slide deck. It wasn’t a learning opportunity. It was a preventable … Read more

Stop Hiring “AI Researchers” to Build Your Production Pipelines I once watched a 12GB BERT model trigger a cascading failure that wiped out a regional payment gateway in seventeen minutes. The “Machine Learning Engineer” on the team—a brilliant guy with a PhD who could derive backpropagation from first principles on a whiteboard—had pushed a new … Read more

React Native: The Bridge is Out and Your App is OOM-Killed It was 3:00 AM on a Tuesday in 2021. I was the lead SRE for a fintech startup that had just launched a high-yield savings feature. We built the mobile app in react native because the “velocity” was supposed to be unmatched. We hit … Read more

The server fans aren’t just spinning; they are screaming, a high-pitched mechanical wail that echoes through the cold aisle, even though I’m sitting five hundred miles away from the nearest physical rack. On my screen, the load average on the primary API gateway is sitting at 412.04. The cursor in my terminal blinks with a … Read more

text Jan 24 03:14:22 core-gw-01 sshd[28412]: Invalid user admin from 192.168.10.42 port 54322 Jan 24 03:14:24 core-gw-01 sshd[28415]: Invalid user support from 192.168.10.42 port 54328 Jan 24 03:14:26 core-gw-01 sshd[28418]: Invalid user ubnt from 192.168.10.42 port 54334 iptables -L -n -v Chain INPUT (policy DROP 421 packets, 24122 bytes) pkts bytes target prot opt in … Read more

Kubernetes Services: Stop Treating Your Network Like a Magic Black Box It was 3:14 AM on a Tuesday in 2019. I was staring at a Grafana dashboard that looked like a heart attack. Our checkout service latency had spiked from 40ms to 12 seconds. We weren’t under a DDoS attack. We hadn’t even deployed new … Read more

I remember when servers had physical buttons you could press, and if something broke, you could smell the ozone. There was a dignity in the hum of a SCSI drive spinning up, a physical manifestation of data being moved by magnetism and sheer willpower. You knew exactly where your bits were. They were on that … Read more

It was 03:14 AM when the Prometheus alerts bypassed my ‘Do Not Disturb’ settings, and I knew exactly which piece of ‘python code’ was responsible. I didn’t even have to look at the Grafana dashboard to know that the worker-api-v2 pods were in a death spiral. My eyes were already burning from seventy-two hours of … Read more