AWS is Just Someone Else’s Data Center (With a Very Expensive API) I once spent thirty-six hours straight in a “War Room” because of a single checkbox in the AWS Console. We were migrating a high-throughput payment processing engine from a colo facility in Virginia to us-east-1. I was the lead SRE, and I thought … Read more

React Native: The High Cost of the “Free” Bridge It was 3:14 AM on a Tuesday in 2019. I was staring at a Grafana dashboard that looked like a heart attack. We had just pushed a “minor” update to our flagship fintech app—a React Native build that promised to unify our logic across iOS and … Read more

text <— TERMINAL SESSION: SSH ROOT@PROD-DB-NODE-04 —> [2024-05-22 03:14:02] node[41029]: (node:41029) [DEP0005] DeprecationWarning: Buffer() is deprecated due to security and usability issues. [2024-05-22 03:14:05] FATAL ERROR: Ineffective mark-compacts near heap limit Allocation failed – JavaScript heap out of memory [2024-05-22 03:14:05] 1: 0xb7a910 node::Abort() [node] [2024-05-22 03:14:05] 2: 0xa8c30e [node] [2024-05-22 03:14:05] 3: 0xd4b520 v8::Utils::ReportOOMFailure(v8::internal::Isolate, … Read more

INCIDENT REPORT: #882-BRAVO-SIERRA STATUS: CRITICAL / SITE DOWN DATE: 2024-05-14 SYSTEM: Payment Processing Gateway (Node.js v20.11.0) ROOT CAUSE: Junior Developer “Chad” discovered async/await but didn’t understand the Event Loop. THE LOGS DON’T LIE I walked into the office at 3:00 AM because the pager went off. The production logs looked like a graveyard. Here is … Read more

Azure: The Enterprise Tax and the Art of Not Getting Paged at 3 AM I once cost a former employer $14,000 in a single weekend because I misunderstood how Azure Log Analytics ingestion pricing worked. I had just finished migrating a high-traffic NGINX ingress controller to a new AKS cluster in eastus2. I wanted “full … Read more

Kubernetes: The Distributed System You Probably Don’t Need (But Are Stuck With Anyway) It was 3:14 AM on a Tuesday in 2021. I was staring at a Grafana dashboard that looked like a heart monitor for someone having a massive coronary. We were running a fleet of microservices on Kubernetes v1.20 in us-east-1. I had … Read more

text [root@ops-bastion-01 ~]# aws ce get-cost-and-usage \ –time-period Start=2024-05-18,End=2024-05-21 \ –granularity DAILY \ –metrics “UnblendedCost” \ –group-by Type=DIMENSION,Key=SERVICE { “ResultsByTime”: [ { “TimePeriod”: {“Start”: “2024-05-18”, “End”: “2024-05-19”}, “Groups”: [ {“Keys”: [“Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud – Compute”], “Metrics”: {“UnblendedCost”: {“Amount”: “412.45”, “Unit”: “USD”}}}, {“Keys”: [“Amazon Simple Storage Service”], “Metrics”: {“UnblendedCost”: {“Amount”: “89.12”, “Unit”: “USD”}}}, {“Keys”: [“Amazon … Read more

$ du -sh ./node_modules 1.2G ./node_modules $ du -sh ../rtos_project/src 420K ../rtos_project/src $ npm install npm ERR! code ERESOLVE npm ERR! ERESOLVE could not resolve dependency npm ERR! Conflicting peer dependency: [email protected] … $ node -v v21.7.1 I’ve spent the last two decades optimizing interrupt service routines to fit within 50-microsecond windows. I’ve fought for … Read more

Timestamp: 03:14 UTC. The pager went off because the API server decided it didn’t feel like responding to heartbeats anymore. $ kubectl get nodes Error from server (Timeout): the server was unable to return a response in the time allotted, but may still be processing the request (get nodes) $ kubectl get pods -A Unable … Read more

It is 3:14 AM. The air in the server room is a dry, static-charged hum, and the coffee in my mug is a bitter, lukewarm sludge that tastes like burnt rubber and regret. I’ve been staring at a debugger for six hours because some “Senior Full-Stack Evangelist” decided that “developer velocity” was more important than … Read more