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RFC 10008 standardizes QUERY, a safe and idempotent HTTP method for structured request-body queries. The useful part is not that we get another verb. It is that the rest of the HTTP path can finally distinguish a read-only body-based query from an arbitrary POST.
“A distributed system is one in which the failure of a computer you didn't even know existed can render your own computer unusable.” — Leslie Lamport Everyone knows the quote. It is funny because it is true. But what the quote does not capture is this:
I’m excited to announce the launch of my new book, Building LLM Systems for Platform Troubleshooting , now available on Amazon. Get the book on Amazon This book is a practical field guide for platform engineers, SREs, DevOps teams, AI platform builders, and technical leaders who want to build
When certificate-based traffic starts failing intermittently after a move to the cloud, latency usually gets blamed first. That is understandable. The path is now longer, round-trip times are higher, and the failures often show up in flows that already involve multiple exchanges: TLS handshakes, mutual TLS, EAP-TLS,
The Discovery: AI Sees What Humans Miss It started with an innocent question: "Why is the server so slow?" I logged into my VPS and saw CPU pegged at 97%. I could have spent hours manually checking processes, reading logs, and hunting through directories. Instead, I opened my
Introduction Distributed systems rarely fail cleanly. Most engineers are trained to look for broken components, bad deployments, or hardware outages. Yet, some of the worst incidents in modern cloud infrastructure occur after the initial trigger has passed. The system stays sick long after the cause disappears. These are metastable failures
PostgreSQL 18, released September 2025, introduces asynchronous I/O. Until now, all reads were synchronous: the backend process issued a system call and waited until the kernel returned the data. PostgreSQL 18 can now queue multiple read requests and continue execution while the kernel or workers handle them. Why is
The Problem A customer approached me after migrating their PostgreSQL database to new infrastructure. On paper the setup looked strong: plenty of CPU, ample memory, and a clean migration to a larger instance. Yet after a few weeks in production, users were reporting that queries were lagging. Resource graphs didn&
Software engineering has always carried the tension between moving fast and staying safe. Teams want to push new ideas into production quickly, but they also need to protect the stability of systems that customers depend on. Traditionally the only lever available was deployment itself: code changes had to be merged,
Networks are unreliable by nature. Links drop, buffers fill, servers run hot. When you connect to a service you are betting that all the intermediate routers, switches, load balancers and firewalls will do their job. Most of the time they do, sometimes they do not. That is why retries exist.
A customer brought me in to review their AWS setup. The mandate was to cut costs and improve performance. One of the first bottlenecks we uncovered was not in the code itself but in how Lambda interacted with the database. At first glance it looked like the system was sized
The launch of TLS 1.4 brings a wave of innovation for cloud networking and security professionals. Designed to solve real-world problems around mobility, replay protection, and post-quantum threats, TLS 1.4 redefines secure connectivity for distributed environments and cloud platforms. Here’s what’s new
If you are starting your journey as a solution architect in the cloud, one of the earliest surprises you may face has little to do with technology and everything to do with billing. AWS makes it easy to spin up services, scale globally, and deliver resiliency far beyond what was
IKEv2 is a clean and efficient VPN protocol, but its reliance on large messages during authentication can cause surprising failures when it crosses access networks that mishandle fragments. Administrators running WatchGuard firewalls and Windows clients have been reporting problems where connections succeed on one ISP but fail completely on another.
The Problem Images seem simple until they aren’t. The moment people can upload photos, you inherit three headaches at once: First, privacy: only the right folks should see the right pixels. Second, performance: shipping multi‑megabyte originals to a mobile grid view makes everything feel sticky and