The Graveyard of Our Infrastructure: A Handover Memo for the Unfortunate $ kubectl get nodes NAME STATUS ROLES AGE VERSION ip-10-0-42-12 NotReady worker 89d v1.29.2 ip-10-0-42-13 NotReady worker 89d v1.29.2 ip-10-0-42-14 Ready worker 89d v1.29.2 ip-10-0-42-15 NotReady worker 89d v1.29.2 $ kubectl describe pod checkout-api-7f8d9b6c5-x4z2l Name: checkout-api-7f8d9b6c5-x4z2l Namespace: prod-main Status: Running IP: 10.2.14.155 Containers: checkout-svc: … Read more

It is 4:42 AM. The sun isn’t up, but my blood pressure is. I’ve spent the last 48 hours staring at a Grafana dashboard that looked like a heart monitor of a patient in active cardiac arrest. My eyes feel like they’ve been rubbed with sandpaper, and the smell of stale, burnt coffee—the kind that’s … Read more

json { “error”: { “code”: “Forbidden”, “message”: “Access denied. Caller was not found in any access policy. \nCaller: appid=––;oid=––;iss=https://sts.windows.net/***/\nVault: secret-store-prod-001; Location: eastus”, “innererror”: { “code”: “AccessDeniedByVNet” } }, “activityId”: “f47ac10b-58cc-4372-a567-0e02b2c3d479”, “clientRequestId”: “b94d27b9-934c-4512-8058-7a3e77033cbc”, “timestamp”: “2024-05-20T14:22:01.442Z” } The marketing team promised us a fortress, but they gave us a glass house. They told us that migrating to … Read more

Stop Treating HTML Like a Solved Problem It was 2014. I was working at a high-frequency trading firm that, for some reason, decided to build their internal monitoring dashboard as a “modern” single-page app. We were streaming live order-book data over a primitive WebSocket implementation. I was the lead SRE, and I made a classic … Read more

[ 402.192834] {1}[Hardware Error]: Hardware error from APEI Generic Hardware Error Source: 1 [ 402.192838] {1}[Hardware Error]: event severity: fatal [ 402.192841] {1}[Hardware Error]: Error 0, type: fatal [ 402.192844] {1}[Hardware Error]: section_type: PCIe error [ 402.192846] {1}[Hardware Error]: port_type: 4, root port [ 402.192848] {1}[Hardware Error]: device_id: 0000:41:00.0 [ 402.192850] {1}[Hardware Error]: slot: 0 … Read more

Incident Report #99-AF-RED: Why the ‘Smart’ Chatbot Nukled the Production Database at 3 AM. 1. Incident Summary I’ve been awake for 72 hours. My blood is 40% espresso and 60% pure, unadulterated spite. If I see one more LinkedIn post about how “artificial intelligence” is going to replace SREs, I am going to throw my … Read more

I’m staring at a git blame from three years ago and I want to scream. The coffee is cold. My eyes feel like they’ve been scrubbed with industrial-grade sandpaper. The sun is coming up, and for the third day in a row, I’m watching the kubectl get pods -A output scroll past like a digital … Read more

Stop Building “Go React” Apps Like It’s 2015 I once spent thirty-six hours straight in a windowless “war room” because of a single http.ResponseWriter that didn’t have its header set correctly. We were running a Go-based microservice that served a React dashboard for a Tier-1 telco. The React app was making thousands of concurrent requests … Read more

Sit down. Shut up. And look at this screen. I’ve spent thirty years in the trenches. I’ve written assembly for flight controllers where a single bit-flip meant a smoking crater in the desert. I’ve squeezed kernels into 4KB of ROM. I’ve spent weeks hunting down a single pointer alignment issue that only manifested at high … Read more

text [2024-05-14 03:14:22.891] [CRITICAL] [worker-72] Uncaught exception: ValueError: Input contains NaN, infinity or a value too large for dtype(‘float32’). [2024-05-14 03:14:22.892] [ERROR] [gunicorn.error] Worker (pid:1402) exited with code 1 [2024-05-14 03:14:23.001] [INFO] [k8s-event] Pod icarus-inference-v2-7f9db88f-xlk2j restarted. Reason: CrashLoopBackOff [2024-05-14 03:14:24.445] [CRITICAL] [upstream-proxy] 502 Bad Gateway – No healthy upstream hosts in cluster ‘icarus_service’ [2024-05-14 03:14:25.110] … Read more