Notes, guides and war stories on running databases and other stateful systems in production.
If you’ve spent any time around Kubernetes, you’ve heard of Prometheus. It shows up in helm charts, in monitoring stack recommendations, in job descriptions. It’s become so embedded in the Kubernetes ecosystem that…
Here’s a scenario. It’s a Tuesday afternoon and your on-call phone goes off. The alert says “RabbitMQ queue depth exceeds 10,000 messages.” You look at your dashboard. Queue depth is definitely high. Memory usage…
Everything in this series so far has implicitly assumed a relatively simple setup: one team, one or a handful of clusters, one ArgoCD instance, a config repo with a reasonable number of applications. That setup works…
Rolling updates, which we covered back in the Kubernetes series, are a significant improvement over taking your service down to deploy a new version. But they have a blind spot: the moment the rollout completes, 100%…
Everything we’ve covered so far has a satisfying elegance to it. Desired state in Git. ArgoCD watching. Cluster reconciling. The whole system is auditable, reproducible, and self-healing. Then someone asks: “where do…
By now you have a Git repo, ArgoCD watching it, and a folder structure that separates environments. The next problem is one that every team hits within the first week: your payments API in dev and your payments API…
Here’s a conversation that happens on almost every team adopting GitOps for the first time. You’ve got ArgoCD running, you’ve written your first Application, you’ve seen the sync work. Now someone asks: “where…
The last two posts covered the theory. GitOps is a good idea. The four principles make sense. Now let’s talk about the software that actually implements it. ArgoCD is the most widely used GitOps controller for…
GitOps gets thrown around a lot as a buzzword, which means it gets applied to a lot of things that aren’t quite it. “We store our manifests in Git” — not quite. “Our CI pipeline runs kubectl apply” — closer, but…
If you’ve been running Kubernetes for a while, you’ve probably settled into a deployment workflow that looks something like this. A developer finishes a feature. CI builds and pushes a new image. Someone — maybe a…