Title: February 4, 2019 - A Day in the Life of Infrastructure Woes

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February 4, 2019. It’s another Tuesday, and I’m staring at a screen that has become my second home. Today’s problem is a familiar one—more servers going down than usual. But this time, it feels like something bigger is amiss.

Morning: The Woes Begin

I arrive in the office early to tackle an urgent alert that’s been flooding our internal Slack channel. It’s related to the monitoring of our Kubernetes cluster. Something must be wrong with the eBPF probes we deployed a few weeks ago, as they’re throwing all sorts of weird errors.

One of my colleagues, Alex, is already here and jumps into the conversation. He thinks it might be an issue with the custom collector that’s part of our monitoring stack. We quickly run through the logs, but nothing jumps out at us. The eBPF probes seem to be logging everything in plain text, which isn’t ideal for troubleshooting.

Afternoon: A Hunt Through Logs

By mid-morning, it’s clear we need more eyes on this. I pull a few other engineers into a huddle and we start diving deeper into the logs. We’re looking for patterns or anomalies that might point to what’s causing the probe failures. One of our junior engineers, Sam, suggests we add some metrics around memory usage and CPU spikes to see if there’s a correlation.

Sam’s idea leads us to a breakthrough. It turns out that one of our Kubernetes nodes is running out of memory due to a few misbehaving pods. This explains the errors we’re seeing with the eBPF probes, as they’re failing because their execution environment isn’t stable.

We quickly make some changes to the node’s resource allocation and restart the problematic pods. The immediate impact is positive; our monitoring now shows no more errors from the probes. But this raises a bigger question: How can we avoid this in the future?

Evening: Reflecting on the Day

As I’m packing up, I find myself thinking about the day’s events. We managed to resolve the issue quickly, but it’s clear that our infrastructure setup needs some attention. The rise of eBPF is exciting, but as with any powerful tool, it requires careful handling and robust monitoring.

One thing that struck me during this incident was how much I rely on tools like Backstage for internal developer portals. These platforms are crucial in helping other teams understand and manage our infrastructure better. It’s a relief to have these resources at hand, even if they can sometimes feel like one more layer of complexity.

Learning from the Experience

Today’s experience also reminded me of the importance of continuous improvement. We’re moving towards platform engineering, and as part of that, we need to formalize our practices around monitoring, resource management, and tooling. The rise of SRE roles in our company is a positive sign that we recognize the value of these practices.

As I close my laptop for the night, I think about all the little wins and losses today brought. It’s days like this that remind me why I love this job—figuring out how to make complex systems work better and more reliably.

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This day was just another in a long string of challenges, but it highlighted some of the key issues we face as engineers: balancing new technologies with well-established practices, ensuring robust monitoring, and continuously improving our processes. There’s always something to learn, and today was no exception.