Steve Francis

So the first time I saw 'Diskless Kafka' advertised at a conference I was suspicious. My mind went straight to 'Serverless' Compute... which despite the name seemed to require a whole lot of servers. Yes, I know, just not ones you manage yourself. But still. Well I've finally dug into 'Diskless' Kafka and it's actually well named! The brokers genuinely offload storage to object stores like S3, which changes the economics and operational overhead pretty dramatically. This article by Abhay Soni lays out the basics clearly with a nice comparison chart to boot. What catches my eye: tiered storage isn't just a cost play. It fundamentally changes how you think about retention and replay. That's a big deal. Curious what others are seeing in the wild with tiered storage adoption?? https://lnkd.in/eXJUdmJF

34

3 Comments

The future of large-scale observability isn't just SaaS vs. self-managed anymore. BYOC (Bring-Your-Own-Cloud) is Grafana's solution to a fundamental challenge: How do you get enterprise-grade observability that's more cost-effective than both open-source and traditional SaaS? BYOC gives you the best of both worlds: ✅ Your infrastructure, your data sovereignty ✅ Our expertise, our operational responsibility ✅ Enterprise reliability without enterprise overhead As Grafana CTO Tom Wilkie explains: "The customers pick up the infrastructure cost, the platform cost... we run it on their dime, but we're the ones operating it. We upgrade it, we patch it, we're on call for it, we're defending the SLO, we're scaling it, we're deploying new features. To us, this is any other Grafana Cloud region." BYOC isn't just about cost optimization—it's about removing the false choice between control and convenience. Your cloud. Our operations. Zero compromise. What observability challenges are you facing that traditional deployment models can't solve?

15

Great article by Duffie Cooley - https://lnkd.in/gNuygtci "The deeper issue is architectural." "Isolation might be the most important primitive in distributed computing that we still haven’t gotten right." Too many choice quotes in this article so I'd just suggest read it in full. Cloud native security could use an extra double dose of nanos unikernels.

18

1 Comment

ClickHouse doesn't have built-in schema migration support. In 2026. For a database used in production by thousands of companies. https://lnkd.in/gCU-4Fry That's not a niche edge case. Schema changes are one of the most common operations in any production database. And in ClickHouse, what looks like a simple column addition can trigger a full table rewrite when you're streaming hundreds of megabytes per second. Tinybird's own migration story is telling. Their first approach to handling materialized view changes was, in their words, "bulletproof but brutally inefficient." Touch just one materialized view and you'd migrate terabytes of upstream data. For a 14TB Kafka table, that meant days-long deployments. Every database has tradeoffs. ClickHouse is genuinely fast for narrow analytical queries. But if your workload evolves (and it will), the operational cost of that evolution is worth understanding before you're 14TB deep. What's the most painful schema migration you've dealt with?

7

TeamPCP, previously linked to compromises of Trivy and KICS, has poisoned the PyPI package litellm. Independent analyses from Endor Labs and JFrog indicate that versions 1.82.7 and 1.82.8 shipped with functionality for Kubernetes lateral movement. The incident reinforces the need for disciplined dependency management and continuous monitoring across developer endpoints and CI infrastructure. Immediate steps: pin to known‑good releases, validate package provenance in pipelines, and conduct threat hunting across Kubernetes estates. https://lnkd.in/gQGAkBej #IncidentResponse #RedTeam #PenTesting #PyPI #KubernetesSecurity #SoftwareSupplyChain

1

Designed and maintained a Kubernetes-based infrastructure lab integrating Docker, kind, Helm, and Ansible. Built an AIOps substrate for intelligent observability and automated remediation, with tooling for cluster inspection (K9s), RBAC governance, and CI/CD pipelines. Documented reproducible workflows to help teams adopt DevSecOps practices at scale. https://lnkd.in/gMkTYUEU

2

Kubernetes is no longer just a tactical tool; it’s a critical foundation for innovation. That’s why our 2025 State of Production Kubernetes matters. Now in its fifth year, this report has become a trusted resource for understanding how real organizations scale, modernize, and operate Kubernetes in production. It’s based on independent research with 455 enterprise and public sector users, and the insights are grounded, strategic, and incredibly relevant. If you’re making decisions around AI, platform engineering, or infrastructure complexity, I highly recommend giving this a read: https://lnkd.in/gjNWvp39 #Kubernetes #KubernetesManagement #AI #PlatformEngineering #VirtualMachines

83

3 Comments

Although we run our core infrastructure at 2% of the price of the equivalent in cloud, this isn't a story about being frugal. It’s about firepower. For a deep-tech startup, compute is the absolute lifeblood of innovation. The goal isn't to save money on your cloud bill, but to get the maximum amount of compute for every dollar you spend. The cost delta = an innovation multiplier. Today, this is probably true for any startup.

15

1 Comment