Case Studies
In-depth engineering case studies: the problem, the constraints, the architecture decisions, how it was built, and the measurable results.
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Filters stack, so two narrow picks often come up empty even when each has results on its own.
A Service Mesh Rollout That Was Worth It
- Architecture
- DevOps
- 20 Oct 2026
- 08 Mins read
The request that started this was not "can we have a service mesh". It was an auditor asking how we encrypted traffic between services, and the honest answer being that we mostly did not. Everything i
Cutting p99 Latency 60% with a Caching Rearchitecture
- Architecture
- Performance
- 13 Oct 2026
- 10 Mins read
The complaint that started this was not about speed. It was a support ticket saying the dashboard "sometimes doesn't load," from a customer whose account was roughly forty times larger than our median
Replacing Cron Chaos with an Event-Driven Pipeline
- Cloud Architecture
- DevOps
- 06 Oct 2026
- 10 Mins read
The handover note said "check the pipeline runs" and nothing else. Behind that sentence were 41 cron jobs spread across 6 EC2 hosts, some chained by sleep 900 because someone had once needed job B t
Hardening a CI/CD Supply Chain to SLSA Level 3
The question that started this was from an auditor, and it was a fair one: can you prove that the container running in production is the one your pipeline built from the commit you think it was? We ha
Taming a 3am Pager: SLOs and Error Budgets That Stuck
- Reliability
- DevOps
- 29 Aug 2026
- 07 Mins read
A platform team was losing people to burnout, and the cause was the pager. On-call meant a phone that went off day and night with alerts about CPU, memory, and pod restarts, the overwhelming majority
Multi-Region Active-Active for a Payments API
- Architecture
- Cloud Computing
- 16 Aug 2026
- 06 Mins read
A payments API that moves real money had been running comfortably in a single AWS region for years. It was reliable until the day it was not: a regional control-plane incident took the whole service o
Building an Internal Developer Platform on Backstage and GitOps
- DevOps
- Platform Engineering
- 03 Aug 2026
- 09 Mins read
Product teams were spending more time waiting on the platform team than building features. Spinning up a new service meant opening a ticket and waiting for someone to provision a repo, wire up CI, wri
Zero-Downtime PostgreSQL Major-Version Upgrade at Scale
A multi-terabyte PostgreSQL 12 database was reaching end of life, and the business ran around the clock, so the usual answer of "schedule a maintenance window" was off the table. We upgraded it to Pos
Migrating a Monolith to Kubernetes Without a Big-Bang Cutover
- DevOps
- Cloud Native
- 20 Jul 2026
- 07 Mins read
Almost every failed "let's move off the monolith" project shares one detail: the plan was a big-bang cutover. Rewrite in parallel, pick a weekend, flip the switch, and pray. This is the opposite of th
Cutting a SaaS AWS Bill 41% Without Slowing Delivery
- Cloud Computing
- DevOps
- 19 Jul 2026
- 10 Mins read
A growing SaaS ran on EKS with a full GitOps pipeline, and it was over its AWS budget nearly every month. The reflex from leadership was the usual one: freeze features until the bill comes down. That
QuenchWorks: Building a 0-CVE Container Image and Helm Chart Catalog
When Bitnami moved its long-trusted catalog behind a paid tier, thousands of teams woke up to a supply-chain problem they didn't choose. The free images they had pinned in production would stop gettin