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Cloud Architecture
Backups: The First Thing Hackers Go After For years, backup strategy felt like an engineering debate. We obsessed over dedupe ratios, throughput, and how fast we could recover—all built on one big assumption: when production failed, backups would still be safe. Ransomware shattered that idea. Hackers don’t treat backups as an afterthought anymore. They aim…
I’ve spent 25 years watching infrastructure fail, and here’s what I’ve learned: most outages don’t kick off with some dramatic meltdown. They creep in quietly. You get a bit of scheduler pressure, some memory reclaim, and no one’s dashboard even notices. Your CPU looks fine at 40%. There’s a 30% buffer left on memory. Still,…
Building a cluster for inference is a weekend project. Building one for distributed training is a war of attrition against physics and “standard” enterprise defaults. After architecting several H100/H200 deployments, I’ve realized the bottlenecks aren’t the GPUs themselves. It’s the “infrastructure tax” we pay for choosing the wrong networking, storage, and BIOS settings. We talk…
Backups are your insurance premium; recovery is cashing the claim. After 15+ years in production war rooms—from Nutanix HCI clusters to hybrid cloud migrations—I’ve watched “green” backup dashboards lie spectacularly. The bits sit safe on disk, but real Recovery Time Objective (RTO) crumbles under hydration speeds, API throttling, or the engineer with the encryption keys…
Private AI infrastructure is systems engineering, not optimization. If you treat a GPU cluster like a standard virtualization farm, you will fail. I have seen deployments where millions of dollars in H100s sat idle 40% of the time because the architect underestimated the network fabric or the storage controller’s ability to swallow a checkpoint. Forget…
The biggest lie we tell junior engineers is that Terraform is a compiler. We hand them a .tf file and say, “This is the infrastructure.” It isn’t. If Terraform were truly “Infrastructure as Code,” then the code would be the source of truth. But anyone who has operated a real cloud environment—especially one with multiple…
When a Kubernetes founder tells you that you might be wrong about a platform limitation, you don’t argue with them. You open a terminal and try to break something. This week, following my autopsy of a GKE IP Exhaustion Outage, I entered a debate with Tim Hockin (thockin), one of the original creators of Kubernetes….
Stop “archi-splaining” governance to your engineers. Modern cloud governance has mutated into a bloated bureaucratic layer that tries to micro-manage every resource through 400-page PDF frameworks. Somewhere along the way, we forgot the lesson Unix taught us forty years ago: Freedom within boundaries. A recent fintech client of ours had 14 subscriptions, nearly 400 Azure…
Latency is undefeated, but swarm behavior is worse—because you usually don’t notice it until the blast radius hits your users, your model, or your cloud bill. While the mainstream media treats Moltbook as a curiosity, technical leadership needs to see it for what it actually is: a hostile multi-tenant control plane where unvetted configuration is…
The “Impossible” Fix: Class E Migration In Part 1, we diagnosed the crime scene: A production GKE cluster flatlined because its /20 subnet (4,096 IPs) hit a hard ceiling at exactly 16 nodes. The “Official” consultant solution? Rebuild the VPC with a /16. The “Actual” engineering solution? Class E Address Space. If you are reading…
