Five years of infrastructure reviews: patterns we keep seeing
After a few hundred reviews, the same handful of issues keep showing up regardless of stack or team size.
Monitoring that doesn't lie to you
Most alerting isn't broken because it's under-built. It's broken because nobody ever removes anything.
Five signs your infrastructure needs a health check
The warning signs are usually visible months before something actually breaks.
Why we automate every deploy, even for small teams
Manual deploys feel fine right up until the one time they don't.
Secrets management for small teams
You don't need a full vault deployment on day one. Here's what actually matters first.
Observability vs. monitoring: a distinction worth making
They get used interchangeably, but they answer different questions.
Moving off a legacy load balancer, without a maintenance window
How we replaced a decade-old load balancer setup while it kept serving traffic the whole time.
Terraform state files: the mistakes we've made
A few state-related incidents from our own history, and what we changed afterward.
What a good incident postmortem actually looks like
Blameless doesn't mean toothless. Here's the structure we actually use.
Cost optimization without breaking things
The order we work through a cost review in, so nothing gets cut that turns out to matter.
On-call burnout is a system design problem
It's rarely fixed by asking people to be more resilient. It's fixed by paging them less.
Infrastructure as code, three years in
What we'd tell ourselves at the start, now that we've maintained these codebases for a while.
Zero-downtime database migrations, a checklist
The concrete steps we run through before any schema change that touches a live table.
Kubernetes: when it's worth it, and when it isn't
A framework for deciding, instead of defaulting to yes or no.
Running incident response with a fully distributed team
What changed for us this year, and what we had to rebuild once nobody was in the same room during an outage.
The case for boring technology
Why we default to the well-worn option, and when we don't.
Containers didn't fix our deploy problems, process did
Containerizing a bad deploy process just gives you a bad deploy process in a container.
What we look for in a first infrastructure review
The specific things we check in the first few days of any new engagement, before we recommend anything.
The restore test nobody runs
A backup you haven't restored from is a hypothesis, not a backup. Here's how we actually verify them.
Why we started Mega2580 Solutions
The problem we kept seeing at every company we worked at, and why we decided to build a small consultancy around fixing it.