Notes from the Field — page 2

A comprehensive learning resource for DevOps professionals, security teams, and developers new to automated security scanning

A cluster that costs three times what it should is rarely running three times the workload. It is usually running the right workload, badly sized, on the wrong pricing model, with a layer of things nobody is willing to delete.

Orchestration Made Easy with Kubernetes

Horizontal Pod Autoscaler is table stakes. But HPA only knows what it observes — CPU, memory, or a custom metric — and it has no opinion about whether a pod was the right size to begin with. That is a different question, answered by a different controller, and the two can be made to work against each other.

Most sessions that start with "the container can't reach the database" end at one of four or five misunderstandings. Docker networking is not magic — it is Linux bridges, veth pairs and iptables with a convenient API on top. Once you can see those three things directly, the guessing stops.

Ingress controllers got most of us started, and Ingress is not deprecated. But on a multi-tenant platform it fails in a specific, predictable way: one object ends up owning TLS, routing and rate limits, which means three teams edit the same YAML and none of them owns it.

I've been doing DevOps and Platform Engineering work for years. Most of what I've learned, I learned by doing — and a lot of the specific, useful knowledge is scattered across Slack threads, internal wikis, and conversations that never made it anywhere public.

This is where that changes.