103 posts · Page 3 of 9. ← Blog
Capacity-based slot reservation is the biggest single FinOps lever for predictable batch workloads, but the transition is harder than the math. Notes from sizing reservations across enterprise GCP customers.
Storage was the second-biggest line item on the Tata BigQuery bill. Long-term storage, physical-vs-logical billing, and column-level retention together took a 6-figure monthly line down to a 5-figure one.
Notes from contributing to Google's open-source Spanner Migration Tool (HarbourBridge). Where to start reading the codebase, where the load-bearing logic lives, and the parts that look simple but aren't.
Spanner partitions by primary-key range. A monotonically-increasing PK like a timestamp or UUID-v1 funnels all writes to one server. The fix changes everything from your sequence strategy to your tenant model.
Interleaving a child table into its parent co-locates the rows for fast joins. It also tightens coupling in ways that bite you on the next schema migration. A practitioner's decision matrix.
A bulk migration takes hours; the application can't be offline that long. CDC keeps the source and destination in sync while the bulk runs, and a quick cutover swaps traffic. The handoff between bulk and CDC is where most migrations go wrong.
Notes from contributing to Bloom — SC Ventures / Standard Chartered's policy-driven secure cloud provisioning platform. Push-to-deploy self-service for bank engineering teams, with the audit controls baked in.
If you encode each SOC 2 control as a Terraform module, the audit becomes a check against module usage rather than a per-resource review. Notes from Bloom and adjacent projects.
Notes from integrating OpenTelemetry into airshipit, an open-source bare-metal Kubernetes lifecycle project with contributions from Ericsson, AT&T, Microsoft, and others. The hard part wasn't OTel; it was making distributed traces useful across foreign code.
The azure-service-operator project lets you declare Azure resources as Kubernetes objects. Notes from the multi-vendor collaboration shape: how decisions got made, what slowed us down, what shipped despite it.
The Picnic social platform served 1M+ users across a graph of Go microservices behind a GraphQL gateway. The latency win came from a counter-intuitive move: fewer services, tighter contracts.
Test coverage and observability are the boring infrastructure that makes the interesting changes safe. Notes on how the Picnic team built both, and the on-call experience they enabled.