Field Notes
The Infrastructure That Starts the Infrastructure - DNS, identity, time and management services should not become circular dependencies during recovery.
Categories:
[Field Notes],
[Infrastructure]
Modern infrastructure has become very good at consolidation.
Virtualization allows us to move services away from dedicated hardware. Central identity removes local accounts. DNS becomes authoritative and dynamic. Configuration management keeps systems consistent. Monitoring provides a common opera...
If Monitoring Fails With the Service, It Was Never Enough - Observability is only useful if enough of it survives the failure it is supposed to explain.
Categories:
[Field Notes],
[Observability]
Monitoring systems are usually designed around a simple question: what information do we need in order to understand the state of our infrastructure and applications? We collect metrics, logs, traces, application telemetry and synthetic measurements, and then use them to build a picture of how the e...
A Direct Link Is Not a Network - Point-to-point 25, 40 or 100 GbE can be excellent for migration, replication and storage traffic, but only if we treat it as a deliberate failure domain rather than a shortcut.
Categories:
[Field Notes],
[Infrastructure]
There is something very attractive about connecting two virtualization hosts directly with a pair of high-speed network interfaces.
No switch. No spanning tree. No intermediate fabric. No uplink contention. Just a cable between two machines and a large amount of bandwidth available for migration,...