# aleksey (blogs) — RSS Amplifier Recent posts from the 2 feeds in the RSS Amplifier directory that cover aleksey. Page: Feed: --- ## [Metastability in Recovery: Cascading Recovery with a Loop](https://charap.co/metastability-in-recovery-cascading-recovery-with-a-loop/) _2026-05-02 · Aleksey Charapko · Aleksey Charapko_ My last metastable blog post discussed the interactions between systems and components and how they can lead to metastable failures. Specifically, I looked at interactions between systems/components and how signals can be misinterpreted by different systems due to ambiguity — a timeout may mean a transient fault that can be fixed by retrying, but it \[ \] ## [Murat and Aleksey Read Papers: “Self-Defining Systems”](https://charap.co/murat-and-aleksey-read-paper-self-defining-systems/) _2026-01-30 · Aleksey Charapko · Aleksey Charapko_ Self-Defining Systems (SDS) by Thomas Anderson, Ratul Mahajan, Simon Peter, and Luke Zettlemoyer is a bold proposal for AI-driven systems research. In SDS, agentic “engineers” get the system specification and operating environment specification, then design and build the systems to spec. Crucially, as the specification or environment changes, an army of agents should notice and \[ \] ## [What I'm doing now](http://tsalolikhin.com/now/) _2026-01-16 · Aleksey Tsalolikhin_ (This is a now page .) Updated January, 2026, from my deep-in-the-woods home in Central Texas, Hill Country. In late 2025, I joined Yahoo as a production DNS engineer. Excited to work on one of world’s largest infrastructures. Presented Vi Tutorial at Texas Linux Fest . CFEngine Tutorial is back online. We are still recovering from flooding (July 2025, Texas hill country). Property is… ## [Murat and Aleksey Read Papers: “Cloudspecs: Cloud Hardware Evolution Through the Looking Glass”](https://charap.co/murat-and-aleksey-read-papers-cloudspecs-cloud-hardware-evolution-through-the-looking-glass/) _2026-01-14 · Aleksey Charapko · Aleksey Charapko_ The Cloudspecs: Cloud Hardware Evolution Through the Looking Glass CIDR paper by Till Steinert, Maximilian Kuschewski, and Viktor Leis was the first paper I and Murat read this year. It was a short, but interesting read. Below is our reading video and my one-paragraph summary. The paper discusses the evolution of AWS cloud (virtual) hardware \[ \] ## [Murat and Aleksey Read Papers: “Rethinking the Cost of Distributed Caches for Datacenter Services”](https://charap.co/murat-and-aleksey-read-papers-rethinking-the-cost-of-distributed-caches-for-datacenter-services/) _2025-12-29 · Aleksey Charapko · Aleksey Charapko_ Murat and Aleksey read Rethinking the Cost of Distributed Caches for Datacenter Services. This paper argues that distributed caches can save money by reducing CPU costs despite using substantially more of the costly DRAM. The authors claim up to 4X savings in synthetic and open-source workloads. The paper also calls for richer caching semantics to \[ \] ## [About](http://tsalolikhin.com/about/) _2025-12-28 · Aleksey Tsalolikhin_ I am a UNIX/Linux systems administrator and trainer, here to help keep the lights on for our sociotechnical civilization. Professional Background I am a master generalist systems administrator, with a specialty in configuration management. I’ve mentored, apprenticed and trained system administrators and other fine operations professionals. I’ve worked in a variety of environments,… ## [Feedback](http://tsalolikhin.com/feedback/) _2025-12-28 · Aleksey Tsalolikhin_ Here’s what students have said about my training: “Very personal approach to teaching. We are bored to death with PowerPoint slides. Most of the class was hands on.” –Prakash Rudraraju “You really do have a gift for taking new concepts that are difficult to grasp and making them accessible.” –JF, UNIX Systems Admin, Airlines Reporting Corp. “This is the best… ## [Photography](http://tsalolikhin.com/photography/) _2025-12-28 · Aleksey Tsalolikhin_ Country life FTW Your browser does not support the video tag. ## [Selected Conference Presentations](http://tsalolikhin.com/presentations/) _2025-12-28 · Aleksey Tsalolikhin_ “Time Management for System Administrators” Workshop based on Tom Limoncelli’s life-saving book . At Ohio LinuxFest 2024 , SoCal Linux Expo 2013 and more. “Power Editing with Vi: Basics” A hands-on workshop based on Bill Joy’s An Introduction to Display Editing with Vi , the original paper introducing the Vi editor and all its features: core and advanced. I put… ## [Tutorials](http://tsalolikhin.com/tutorials/) _2025-12-28 · Aleksey Tsalolikhin_ My CFEngine and Vi training materials are online: CFEngine Tutorial - Learn configuration management with CFEngine Power Editing with Vi: Basics - Master the fundamentals of the Vi text editor ## [Brisk AI News Briefings (Sponsored)](https://crawlproof.com/a/zaFeL98dhLsY) _2025-12-27 · **Sponsored**_ Read AI summaries and listen to audio briefings for top stories. ## [Writing](http://tsalolikhin.com/writing/) _2025-12-28 · Aleksey Tsalolikhin_ Book Contribution “CFEngine 3.5.1 Agent Promise Attributes \[Appendix C\]” In Diego Zamboni, Learning CFEngine 3 (pp. 215-229). O’Reilly, October 2013. Articles “LISA ‘12: Real World Configuration Management Workshop” USENIX ;login: , April 2013. “Mars Code: Building Robust Software” Vertical Sysadmin, October 2012. “System Administration of the… ## [On Metastable Failures and Interactions Between Systems](https://charap.co/on-metastable-failures-and-interactions-between-systems/) _2025-12-24 · Aleksey Charapko · Aleksey Charapko_ I ve written about metastable failures before. The topic has been picked up by a few different teams since the, all analyzing metastable failures more, while I apparently has been slacking off Anyway, Metastable failures are self-sustaining performance failures that arise in systems due to a positive feedback loop triggered by an initial problem. This positive \[ \] ## [Murat and Aleksey Read Papers: “Barbarians at the Gate: How AI is Upending Systems Research”](https://charap.co/murat-and-aleksey-read-papers-barbarians-at-the-gate-how-ai-is-upending-systems-research/) _2025-10-17 · Aleksey Charapko · Aleksey Charapko_ The Barbarians at the Gate: How AI is Upending Systems Research paper by Audrey Cheng, Shu Liu, Melissa Pan, Zhifei Li, Bowen Wang, Alexander Krentsel, Tian Xia, Mert Cemri, Jongseok Park, Shuo Yang, Jeff Chen, Lakshya Agrawal, Aditya Desai, Jiarong Xing, Koushik Sen, Matei Zaharia, Ion Stoica from Berkeley has recently made a splash in \[ \] ## [Academic Chat with Murat and Aleksey: 5 Cs of the Invisible Curriculum.](https://charap.co/academic-chat-with-murat-and-aleksey-5-cs-of-the-invisible-curriculum/) _2025-10-10 · Aleksey Charapko · Aleksey Charapko_ Instead of reading papers, last night, Murat and I engaged in an interesting discussion on skills, traits, and qualities needed for a PhD. This discussion came as a follow-up to Murat s recent blog on The Invisible Curriculum of Research. In his blog, Murat discusses Curiosity, Clarity, Craft, Community, and Courage as skills/qualities of a good \[ \] ## [HoliPaxos: Towards More Predictable Performance in State Machine Replication](https://charap.co/holipaxos-towards-more-predictable-performance-in-state-machine-replication/) _2025-08-12 · Aleksey Charapko · Aleksey Charapko_ I will be presenting our new paper, HoliPaxos: Towards More Predictable Performance in State Machine Replication, at the VLDB 25. Feel free to ping me if you are there and want to chat! This paper explores several orthogonal optimizations to the classical MultiPaxos state machine replication protocol to improve its performance stability in the presence of \[ \] ## [Fall 2025 Reading List (##201-210)](https://charap.co/fall-2025-reading-list-201-210/) _2025-08-05 · Aleksey Charapko · Aleksey Charapko_ Here is a list for the Fall 2025 semester. Please join the reading group here: https://discord.gg/VS7J4PAU58. We meet on Thursdays. The schedule is also available on our calendar. ## [Paper #196. The Sunk Carbon Fallacy: Rethinking Carbon Footprint Metrics for Effective Carbon-Aware Scheduling](https://charap.co/paper-196-the-sunk-carbon-fallacy-rethinking-carbon-footprint-metrics-for-effective-carbon-aware-scheduling/) _2025-04-14 · Aleksey Charapko · Aleksey Charapko_ The last paper we covered in the Distributed Systems Reading group discussed CPUs, data centers, scheduling, and carbon emissions we read The Sunk Carbon Fallacy: Rethinking Carbon Footprint Metrics for Effective Carbon-Aware Scheduling. Below is my improvised presentation of this paper for the reading group. This paper was an educational read for me, as I learned \[ \]