DevOps
Zero-downtime deploys without Kubernetes: a practical look at Kamal
Kamal ships containers to plain Linux servers over SSH and swaps traffic with a tiny proxy. Here's how the pieces fit, and when it's the right tool.
Topic
DevOps
Deployment, infrastructure, CI/CD and observability.
DevOps
Logs, metrics and traces — what each one is actually for
The "three pillars" of observability answer different questions. Knowing which one to reach for saves hours during an incident.
DevOps
Rolling, blue-green or canary? Choosing a deploy strategy
Every deploy strategy trades speed, cost and blast radius differently. Here's how the three common ones compare and when each makes sense.
DevOps
Writing Dockerfiles that build in seconds, not minutes
Most slow Docker builds come down to layer ordering. A few structural habits make rebuilds dramatically faster.
DevOps
Health checks that mean something: liveness vs. readiness
A health check that always returns 200 is worse than none. Separate "is the process alive?" from "can it serve traffic?" and your deploys get safer.
DevOps
Feature flags: separating deploy from release
Shipping code and turning on a feature don't have to happen at the same moment. Flags make releases boring — if you also clean them up.
DevOps
Zero-downtime database migrations with expand and contract
Renaming a column sounds trivial until old and new code run at the same time. The expand/contract pattern makes schema changes safe during live deploys.
DevOps
Infrastructure as code: what belongs in it, and what doesn't
Declaring infrastructure in version control makes it reviewable and repeatable. It also has sharp edges — state, secrets and drift.
DevOps
SLOs and error budgets: deciding how reliable is reliable enough
100% uptime is the wrong goal. Service level objectives turn reliability into a number you can plan around, and error budgets tell you when to slow down.
DevOps
Structured logging: making logs you can actually query
Free-form log lines are easy to write and painful to search. Emitting events with consistent fields turns logs into data.