How a South African dot-com millionaire who flew to the ISS forked Debian into "Linux for human beings," mailed free CDs to the planet, lost almost every technical bet he made — Unity, Mir, Upstart, convergence — and still ended up owning the operating system the cloud actually runs on.
Cloud
-
The Story of Ubuntu -
Infrastructure as Code in 2026: Terraform, OpenTofu, and the State You Have to Manage The foundational guide to infrastructure as code in 2026 — the declarative model and why the state file is the hard part, the Terraform BUSL license change and the OpenTofu fork, real configuration and workflow, remote state and locking after the DynamoDB era, modules, the broader landscape from Pulumi to Crossplane, and the failure modes nobody warns you about.
-
GCP for the AWS-Fluent Engineer Google Cloud from the perspective of someone who already knows AWS: the resource hierarchy that replaces accounts and OUs, IAM that works completely differently, GKE as the best managed Kubernetes, Cloud Run as containers-done-serverless, BigQuery as the genuinely differentiated killer app, and the global VPC model that will break your mental picture on day one. Includes a full AWS-to-GCP service translation table.
-
Oracle Cloud's Always-Free ARM Tier A dense, honest guide to Oracle Cloud's Always Free Ampere A1 tier: exactly what the 4 OCPU / 24 GB allocation buys you, the notorious 'Out of host capacity' problem and how to fight it, idle-instance reclamation and account-closure risks, and how to run real workloads — k3s, WireGuard, self-hosted stacks — at zero marginal cost.
-
AWS EKS Deep Dive: Managed Kubernetes on AWS A comprehensive technical guide to Amazon EKS covering node groups vs Fargate vs Karpenter, IRSA, Pod Identity, add-ons lifecycle, networking choices, cluster upgrades with zero downtime, EKS Anywhere, and cost optimization.
-
Apache Pulsar vs Kafka: Architecture, Trade-offs, and When to Choose Each Architecture differences, subscription models, multi-tenancy, geo-replication, tiered storage, schema registry, and an honest decision framework for choosing between Kafka and Pulsar in 2026.
-
AWS CDK Deep Dive Construct levels L1/L2/L3, stacks and environments, custom constructs, CDK Pipelines, escape hatches, testing, and an honest CDK vs Terraform comparison.
-
AWS EventBridge in Depth Event buses, schema discovery, archives and replay, Pipes for point-to-point integration, Scheduler for replacing cron jobs, cross-account routing, and real-world patterns including the saga.
-
AWS IAM: Permission Boundaries, SCPs, and Least Privilege at Scale IAM policy evaluation logic, permission boundaries, Service Control Policies, IAM Access Analyzer, ABAC with tags, and the common misconfigurations that lead to privilege escalation.
-
AWS Networking Deep Dive: VPCs, Transit Gateway, and PrivateLink A practical guide to AWS network design: CIDR planning that won't strand you later, subnet layout by tier and AZ, security groups vs NACLs, VPC peering vs Transit Gateway vs PrivateLink decision framework, NAT Gateway patterns, and Route 53 Resolver for private DNS and hybrid environments.
-
AWS Systems Manager: Beyond Parameter Store Session Manager for SSH-free access, Run Command for fleet operations, Patch Manager, Automation runbooks, State Manager for configuration drift, and the full no-bastion-host architecture.
-
Cloud Cost Engineering: FinOps Without the Buzzwords A practical guide to cloud cost engineering: commitment discounts (Savings Plans vs Reserved Instances vs Spot), tagging governance for real cost allocation, rightsizing with Compute Optimizer, hunting idle and zombie resources, data transfer costs that hide in plain sight, storage tier optimization, and the organizational work that matters more than any tool.
-
Cloud Database Trade-offs: RDS vs Aurora vs DynamoDB vs ElastiCache When to use RDS, Aurora, Aurora Serverless v2, DynamoDB, and ElastiCache. Connection pooling with RDS Proxy, single-table DynamoDB design, partition hotspots, Valkey, and the cost math.
-
Container Security in the Cloud: From Image to Runtime Supply chain hardening with Cosign and Syft, ECR scanning, Pod Security Standards, Falco runtime detection, network policies, External Secrets Operator, and admission controllers.
-
Crossplane: Kubernetes-Native Cloud Infrastructure Managed Resources, Composite Resources, Claims, XRDs, and Compositions in depth. Provider auth, composition functions, ArgoCD integration, and an honest comparison with Terraform.
-
HashiCorp Packer: Golden AMIs and Immutable Infrastructure HCL2 build templates, multi-builder parallelism, provisioners, post-processors, HCP Packer lineage tracking, and building a production AMI pipeline in GitHub Actions.
-
Karpenter: Kubernetes Node Autoscaling Done Right A practical guide to Karpenter: how it differs from cluster-autoscaler, NodePool and EC2NodeClass configuration, Spot instance handling with automatic fallback, consolidation and disruption budgets, weighted NodePools for multi-tier workloads, GPU node provisioning, drift detection, and the operational patterns that reduce your EC2 bill.
-
Kubernetes Debugging in Production A systematic approach to CrashLoopBackOff, OOMKilled, Pending pods, DNS failures, network policy blocks, and certificate errors — with the exact commands to run at each stage.
-
Multi-Region Active-Active: What It Actually Takes Latency routing, conflict resolution, DynamoDB Global Tables, Aurora Global Database, RTO/RPO math, and why most teams shouldn't attempt full active-active.
-
OpenSearch in Production Index lifecycle management, shard sizing decisions, dashboards, alerting, k-NN neural search, the OpenSearch vs Elasticsearch question in 2026, and running OpenSearch on Kubernetes.
-
Serverless in Production: Lambda Patterns That Hold Up A practical guide to running AWS Lambda in production: the cold start problem and its real solutions, concurrency and throttling mechanics, event-driven fan-out with SQS and SNS, Step Functions for durable orchestration, API Gateway cost traps, container images vs layers, idempotency, and the patterns that break under load.
-
Terraform at Scale: Modules, Remote State, and the Drift Problem A practical guide to running Terraform in production: S3 remote state with native locking, workspace vs directory-based environment separation, module versioning strategies, Terragrunt for DRY configuration, drift detection in CI, moved blocks for safe refactoring, and state surgery when things go sideways.
-
OpenCost: Kubernetes Cost Attribution How to install and use OpenCost to break down Kubernetes spending by namespace, team, and workload — with Prometheus metrics, Grafana dashboards, and the allocation API.
-
Karpenter: Intelligent Node Autoscaling for Kubernetes How Karpenter outperforms Cluster Autoscaler with just-in-time node provisioning, flexible NodePool configuration, spot instance handling, bin-packing, and intelligent cost optimization strategies.
-
Hetzner Cloud for Homelab Overflow: Cost-Effective Cloud Bursting and Geo-Redundancy How to use Hetzner Cloud as a cost-effective overflow for your homelab — bursting compute to the cloud, adding geo-redundancy, and building hybrid setups that combine the best of on-premises and cloud infrastructure.
-
NFS Filers in Azure: A Complete Management Guide Everything you need to know about managing NFS storage in Azure — Azure NetApp Files and Azure Files NFS — covering provisioning, quotas, user usage, export policies, snapshots, monitoring, and production best practices.
-
Terraform for the Homelab: Manage Local and Cloud Resources with One Workflow A comprehensive guide to using Terraform in your homelab — covering the Proxmox provider for VMs and LXC containers, Hetzner and DigitalOcean for cloud overflow, Cloudflare DNS management, remote state with MinIO, reusable modules, and CI/CD workflows that treat your infrastructure like code.
-
Microsoft Azure as a Personal VPS: The Complete Guide to Pricing, Setup, and Cost Optimization Everything you need to know about running a personal VPS on Microsoft Azure — VM tiers, pricing models, security hardening, and battle-tested strategies to cut your cloud bill by up to 90%.
-
Self-Hosting vs Cloud: A Cost Analysis Real numbers comparing VPS, home servers, and managed services.