Hi there 👋

I subscribe to a loose interpretation of the 3-2-1 backup strategy for my essential files, mainly my photos. I have: The primary/working copy on disk in my computer Backblaze continuous local backup (to protect against local emergencies like fires, etc.), with their 1-year file history option A periodic sync to Google Drive since I’m already paying Google for my email A manually performed copy of my files on a portable drive left in a safety deposit box During my university days, my backup process was different....

I’ve had this war story-type draft for a few weeks, but it felt incomplete. Then an intern candidate asked me “What is the worst incident you were involved in, and what was the outcome?” For context, I’ve been in the SRE space since 2014. I’ve had accidents, and broken production a few times, but one incident stands out to me. Setting the stage An engineer joined my team as an internal transfer from another team within the company, and they were getting exposed to our systems by cleaning up the monitoring configs for our services....

Yes I’m copying Charlie Brooker’s show name. My 2021: Overall, worse than 2020 for me, but at least it ended on an upward note while 2020 ended flat. 2020 was mostly good for me: I got promoted to senior in February 2020 My capacity management project suddenly became a lot more important to my management chain when the lockdowns started I moved in with my partner 2 weeks before the lockdowns after 7+ years of a long-distance relationship We adopted a very cute dog I even bought a car (so we could take the dog to the dog park, and not subject the dog to plane trips when travelling) 2021 was shaping up to be a plateau from 2020....

The Reverse Proxy type of load balancer is probably the most common one - it is Good Enough for most applications. The differences between the L4 and L7 proxy variants come from which level of the OSI model they deal with. L4 load balancers deal with individual connection flows (think TCP/UDP packets, plain bytes), while L7 load balancers deal with individual requests (think HTTP requests, GETs or POSTs). In the proxy design, incoming connections are terminated on the load balancer, and the request passed on to one of the backend servers, either by opening a new connection or using an already established one....

This is a long form version of my talk at SRECon EMEA 2019 - Load Balancing Building Blocks. But it’s turned into a bit of a brain dump, writing down what I’ve learnt. My alternative title was “What I wish I knew about (Network) Load Balancing”. Why do we need Load Balancing? Load balancing essentially comes down to spreading requests across multiple servers. There are a few common reasons to do so:...

tl;dr: Glacier-the-service/“Glacier direct APIs” have been untouched for years (read: probably not going to get new features), Glacier-the-storage-class looks like the new replacement. I don’t think there’s any reasons to put new data into Glacier vaults, using the storage class on objects in a S3 bucket is a better experience Because it’s AWS, Glacier-the-service will continue to be supported indefinitely. This post is an expanded version of my post on reddit, which I wrote after trying and failing to switch my photo backup (in a Glacier Vault) to use Glacier Deep Archive....

I’m not much of a designer, so I just found a theme I liked, and ran with that. Chose PaperMod, though Fuji remains a future possibility. Hugo is actually pretty decent at selective overrides, so the underlying theme isn’t modified. I don’t have to manage git merges, though this complicated some aspects. Changes I’ve made Post page footer reordered to have the comment section come before the share buttons. Also stripped out the cover image and internationalization support to make it simpler....