infrastructure

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I Accidentally Became the DevOps Guy
2 months ago
- The author used a SaaS/PaaS stack (Supabase, Vercel, Render) for over three years without traditional cloud providers like AWS or GCP.
- Changes in Render's pricing (reduced bandwidth from 100GB to 5GB) and higher costs for managed compute prompted a migration to AWS.
- Terraform was adopted from the start to manage multi-project, multi-environment infrastructure repeatably.
- Backend services moved from Render to ECS on Fargate, with GitHub Actions for CI/CD and RDS for the database.
- A key issue was RDS automatic password rotation causing production outages because the application used a static DATABASE_URL instead of the managed secret.
- The database experience on RDS was inferior to Supabase's table viewer and SQL editor, making casual data inspection cumbersome.
- The migration saved about $15-20 per month but introduced significant time spent on learning, debugging, and maintaining infrastructure.
- The author concludes that moving to a cloud provider is only worthwhile when the team has enough bandwidth to own the infrastructure long-term.
GitHub is the wrong shape for this new world
2 months ago
- Software engineering has fundamentally changed, requiring new tools and workflows beyond GitHub's collaboration-centric paradigm.
- Bottlenecks in source control, CI/CD, code review, and deployments are now amplified as code contributions come from across the company, not just engineering.
- Key unanswered questions include code ownership, trust, review, integration, and cost-benefit analysis of AI-generated code.
- Current human-centered collaboration models are a bottleneck; a shift to high-throughput infrastructure primitives is needed.
- Software delivery should be reimagined as continuous automated processes built on primitives like source control, execution, artifacts, caching, identity, and policy.
Reading List 05/16/26
2 months ago
- Tokyo achieves relatively affordable housing by building extensively, despite high land values; land is expensive but structures are cheap due to relaxed supply constraints.
- The House introduced a housing bill in response to the Senate's 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, notably omitting restrictions on build-to-rent housing.
- An improvised explosive device (IED) was discovered near an Alabama dam, raising security concerns.
- Fervo, a geothermal energy company, announced its initial public offering (IPO).
- Oil supply disruptions from the Strait of Hormuz and Iran conflict affect global markets, including naphtha shortages impacting Japanese snacks and semiconductors.
Reading List 06/13/2026
2 months ago
- Homes are being built on top of libraries or combined with library developments, with over 1,800 apartments built across the US as part of such projects.
- Manufacturing a Patriot missile takes more than two years due to supplier delays for parts and subcomponents.
- Chinese car manufacturer BYD aims to become the world's largest carmaker within five years, despite high US tariffs.
- Google ordered 3 million TPUs from Intel, and analysts suggest Intel should raise capital.
- Solar energy supplied 12.8% of US electricity in a recent month, surpassing coal at 12.2%, marking a historic first.
- Coal plants scheduled for closure are being kept operating longer due to data center demand, and the Trump administration plans to build two new coal plants using the Defense Production Act.
- A tunnel project between the US and Russia is also mentioned.
Show HN: Infrawrench – a tool to manage cloud and svcs with workflows and chat
2 months ago
- Infrawrench provides a unified interface to manage 25+ cloud providers and hundreds of resource types, with automatic discovery and sync every 30 seconds.
- Launch full SSH terminals directly from Infrawrench without external clients; desktop runs locally, cloud app proxies via WebSocket.
- Browse and manage Kubernetes clusters: exec into pods, stream logs, import YAML, edit configs; web app proxies exec sessions.
- Built-in SQL editor with schema autocomplete and support for various databases from PostgreSQL to serverless edge databases.
- Built-in object storage file browser for S3, GCS, Cloudflare R2, Azure Blob Storage, and DigitalOcean Spaces.
- Build custom dashboards by pinning resources, with live stats, status, and native OS notifications for metric thresholds.
- View, rotate, and export secrets from AWS Secrets Manager, GCP Secret Manager, Azure Key Vault, etc., with encryption at rest.
- Provision VMs, Kubernetes clusters, databases, and more with guided forms, real-time cost estimation, and SSH key selection.
- Desktop app works fully offline; sign in to sync accounts, resources, dashboards, and credentials bidirectionally with cloud.
- Cloud-native access: terminal sessions proxied via WebSocket, no VPN or local SSH client needed.
- Resource wiring exposes typed outputs (IPs, connection strings, tokens, kubeconfigs) that automatically link to relevant tools.
- Cross-cloud resource wiring: connect outputs from any AWS resource to another context, e.g., RDS endpoint to SQL editor.
- Object storage generates scoped access tokens on demand for file browser, avoiding long-lived credential storage.
Show HN: Trifle – Open-source analytics that stores answers, not events
2 months ago
- Track metrics using your existing database without managing infrastructure.
- Use a single API call to track counters, revenue, hierarchical data across Ruby, Elixir, and Go.
- Trifle ecosystem includes core library (Stats), dashboard/app, and CLI for terminal or AI agents.
- Data flows in via key, timestamp, and nested values, rolled into time buckets for instant querying.
- Supports various use cases: revenue tracking, background workers, feature usage, custom code, business KPIs, and AI agent analytics.
- DropBot uses Trifle to track over 80 million daily calculations, catching anomalies before customers notice.
- First 20 customers get Cloud Pro at $19/month for life with a personal onboarding session.
What's Under Your Feet in New York City?
2 months ago
- New York City's underground infrastructure includes water lines, electrical grids, steam pipes, natural gas lines, telecommunications, sewers, subways, and deep water tunnels.
- Water mains run at high pressure to prevent contamination and are laid in grids for redundancy; NYC's water is gravity-fed from upstate and unfiltered, with over 900 sampling stations for quality testing.
- About 85% of electrical lines are underground, with a 'secondary network' system of 70 networks using underground transformers and redundant feeders for high reliability, though this contributes to higher electricity costs.
- NYC's district heating network is the world's largest, delivering steam for heating and other uses, facing challenges like thermal expansion and condensation managed with expansion loops and steam traps.
- Telecommunications lines run through standardized underground ducts managed by Empire City Subway, and the city is developing a 3D database to map the often unrecorded 'spaghetti' of old utilities.
- Combined sewer overflows occur during rain due to historic system design; NYC is addressing this with rain gardens, retention tanks, and separate storm sewers, while working under a consent decree.
- The subway system primarily uses cut-and-cover tunnels, with deeper sections bored by tunnel boring machines; deep water tunnels like Tunnel 3 (650 ft deep) bring fresh water from upstate and are still under construction.
Half a Second – a book about the XZ backdoor
2 months ago
- In March 2024, a Microsoft engineer discovered a hidden backdoor in XZ Utils, a widely used Linux compression tool, after noticing a half-second delay in login.
- The backdoor was inserted over two years through manipulation of a burned-out, solo volunteer maintainer, highlighting vulnerabilities in open-source infrastructure.
- The incident reveals a structural imbalance: critical but unglamorous software components often rely on unpaid, overstretched volunteers, while major parts receive corporate funding.
- The book 'Half a Second' is narrative nonfiction for general readers, explaining technical aspects in plain language, and is available in free web, PDF, and EPUB formats.
Let's Build PlanetScale from Scratch: Infrastructure
2 months ago
- The author is building Homescale, a tool for creating writable database instances and point-in-time branches from immutable snapshots without full database copies.
- Homescale uses a Docker-like model with images, containers, and branches, supporting multiple database engines like Postgres.
- It separates storage from compute, enabling branching in the storage layer using copy-on-write (COW) to share unchanged data across branches.
- Ceph provides the underlying block storage with RBD for immutable snapshots and writable COW clones, integrated via Kubernetes and Rook.
- Homescale leverages Kubernetes as a control plane for managing resources like PVCs and VolumeSnapshots, with plans for local and cloud deployments.
Making 768 servers look like 1
2 months ago
- Database sharding is essential for scaling relational databases beyond a few terabytes of data, as it addresses bottlenecks like write limitations and storage capacity that arise with single-node databases or read-replicas.
- A proxy layer (router) is key in sharding systems like Neki for Postgres and Vitess for MySQL, as it manages query routing, data distribution, and connection pooling, making multiple shards appear as a single database to applications.
- Sharding involves distributing data across many servers (e.g., 768 servers for a petabyte-scale system), using strategies like hashing IDs, and may include load balancers to handle high query volumes while hiding complexity from apps.
Blockmachine
2 months ago
- Blockmachine provides fast and correct verifiable blockchain infrastructure via RPC access across supported chains.
- Features include competitive pricing from a network of competing suppliers, ensuring low costs, fast and reliable low-latency access, and verified correctness through continuous testing.
- Public performance dashboards display real-time uptime, latency, and error rates, ensuring transparency.
- The service works by connecting apps to standard JSON-RPC endpoints, with automated routing to the best nodes and billing only on successful requests.
- The current live offerings include the core network, customer console, Ethereum RPC, and crypto payment rails, with plans to expand chain coverage and regional reach.
We Mapped Rural Data Center Development – and Opposition
2 months ago
- Northern Virginia's Data Center Alley, with the most data centers globally, is expanding into rural areas due to AI-driven growth.
- Rural counties host about 6% of operating data centers, with 12% of new projects in these areas, facing challenges like smaller tax bases and limited resources.
- Analyses vary: Pew Research reports over 1,500 new data centers planned, with 67% in rural areas, using a broader definition than the Daily Yonder.
- Power imbalances in negotiations, like in Port Washington, Wisconsin, where a $15 billion data center could double local taxes, highlight rural vulnerabilities.
- Data centers are often built near high-voltage transmission lines (345kV and above), with rural facilities median distance about four miles from such infrastructure.
- Resistance groups, numbering around 129 in rural counties, are growing bipartisan opposition, with polls showing 70% of Americans oppose local AI data centers.
Nationwide outage for Australia's largest mobile operator Telstra
2 months ago
- Telstra's mobile network experienced a major nationwide outage, potentially affecting millions of customers and causing disruptions to public transport, payment systems, and traffic lights.
- The outage began early Wednesday morning, impacting not only Telstra users but also customers of other providers that use its network, such as Boost and Aldi, with some emergency Triple Zero calls also affected in certain areas.
- In response, Telstra is investigating the issue, while emergency services advise using alternative devices for calls, and public transport services in NSW and Victoria have been suspended or delayed, with no estimated fix time provided.
Egypt Is Building a New Nile
3 months ago
- Egypt's New Delta project aims to reclaim 9,200 sq km of desert for agriculture to relieve pressure on the Nile Delta, which sustains 95% of the population but is strained by population growth, urbanization, and water scarcity.
- The project involves complex water management: the Al Hammam canal recycles agricultural wastewater, a second system draws from the Nile, and a large treatment plant processes water for irrigation, using pumping stations and underground pipes to overcome engineering challenges.
- Satellite images show rapid progress with new circular fields, but concerns exist about sustainability, as much irrigation relies on non-renewable groundwater, and critics note the focus on export crops may not address food security or reduce reliance on wheat imports.
- Historical context includes the Aswan High Dam altering flood cycles and sediment flow, and the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam introducing uncertainty over Nile water flow, exacerbating Egypt's water challenges.
- Previous desert reclamation efforts like Toshka had limited success, raising questions about large projects' long-term viability. The New Delta's success hinges on sustainable operation amid water scarcity and population growth, potentially shaping Egypt's future.
Various projects disappeared from kernel.org hosting overnight
3 months ago
- Several projects hosted on kernel.org vanished overnight, causing concern among users.
- A misconfiguration in the primary mirror led to the deletion of all content under /pub directory.
- Data restoration is in progress, with some projects like iw and usb already returning.

infrastructure

I Accidentally Became the DevOps Guy

GitHub is the wrong shape for this new world

Reading List 05/16/26

Reading List 06/13/2026

Show HN: Infrawrench – a tool to manage cloud and svcs with workflows and chat

Show HN: Trifle – Open-source analytics that stores answers, not events

What's Under Your Feet in New York City?

Half a Second – a book about the XZ backdoor

Let's Build PlanetScale from Scratch: Infrastructure

Making 768 servers look like 1

Blockmachine

We Mapped Rural Data Center Development – and Opposition

Nationwide outage for Australia's largest mobile operator Telstra

Egypt Is Building a New Nile

Various projects disappeared from kernel.org hosting overnight