Writing
Notes from the trenches
Mostly infrastructure, mostly things that surprised me in production. Several of these started as LinkedIn posts and grew into something longer once there was room for the methodology.
- 5 min readFeatured
Firecracker microVMs, or how to run untrusted agents without betting the host
Everyone is running untrusted AI agents now. I benchmarked Firecracker to find out whether you really can get VM-grade isolation at container speed. Average boot: 216.7ms.
firecrackerawslambdaai-agentsserverlessisolation - 4 min readFeatured
Serverless scales. Your database does not.
Auto-scaling compute sounds like the whole answer until every one of those functions opens its own database connection. The ceiling is not your CPU, it is your connection limit.
serverlessawsdatabasesarchitecturemongodblambda - 3 min read
What I told a graduating batch about cloud, and about jobs
My first workshop on cloud computing turned into forty minutes on something else entirely: whether any of them were going to get hired.
careercloudteachingcertifications - 4 min read
Who load balances the load balancer?
Scaling backends is a solved problem. Scaling the load balancer in front of them, at Layer 4, where clients connect to raw IPs, is a much harder puzzle. Maglev and AWS Hyperplane solve it the same way.
networkingdistributed-systemsload-balancingawsarchitecture - 3 min read
The hardest systems are the boring ones
Developers picture complexity as cutting-edge AI. Years in the field taught me it usually looks like a CRUD app with 2.5 billion rows and no room to change the schema.
system-designarchitecturedatabasesscale