writing
Thoughts on engineering leadership, distributed systems, architecture, and the craft of building software.
192 essays and counting
2012: The Year the Cloud Became Real
A year-end reflection on how 2012 marked the turning point when cloud computing stopped being experimental and became the default
VMware, RAID, and Storage Architecture Lessons
Deep lessons from enterprise storage architecture work, including RAID configurations, VMware storage design, and the failures that taught me the most
Ansible, Puppet, Chef: The Configuration Management Wars
A practitioner's comparison of the three major configuration management tools and why I think the landscape is about to get interesting
Raspberry Pi and the Maker Movement
The Raspberry Pi Model B shipped earlier this year and it reignited something I forgot I had: the joy of tinkering
Google Compute Engine and the Three-Horse Cloud Race
Google just announced Compute Engine at I/O, and suddenly the cloud is a three-way competition between AWS, Azure, and GCP
Running a Linux NOC: Chasing 99.9% Uptime
What it actually takes to keep Linux infrastructure running at 99.9% uptime, from the perspective of someone who lives in the NOC
AWS DynamoDB: Fully Managed NoSQL Changes the Game
DynamoDB went GA earlier this year and I think it represents a fundamental shift in how we think about databases
Linux Containers Before Docker: LXC, Cgroups, and Namespaces
The container landscape before Docker existed, and why LXC, cgroups, and namespaces matter more than most people realize