$ cat post/grep-through-the-dark-log-/-i-git-bisect-to-old-code-/-the-stack-still-traces.md
grep through the dark log / I git bisect to old code / the stack still traces
Embracing the Shift in Infrastructure Management
August 26, 2019 was a day that felt like it encapsulated the shift we were seeing in tech. Platform engineering was formalizing, internal developer portals (like Backstage) were starting to gain traction, and SRE roles were becoming more ubiquitous. Meanwhile, Kubernetes complexity fatigue was just beginning to rear its head. The era of microservices was still relatively new, but the pains of managing them were starting to be noticed.
I remember those days vividly. I was working on a project where we were trying to scale our infrastructure for remote-first operations, which was becoming increasingly necessary as more and more teams started working from home due to the looming threat of a global pandemic (yes, the one we’re still navigating). The infrastructure needed to handle both sudden spikes in traffic and steady increases in the number of users who were now operating entirely remotely.
One of the big challenges we faced was understanding how to properly manage our Kubernetes clusters. We had multiple teams spinning up their own clusters, and the chaos was starting to show. There were issues with resource allocation, security patches, and overall maintenance that were just becoming unmanageable. This is where eBPF came in as a potential savior. The low-level capabilities of eBPF for tracing and monitoring seemed like they could provide us with the insights we needed to better manage our clusters.
However, implementing eBPF was no easy feat. It required a deep understanding of the Linux kernel and some serious debugging skills. I spent countless nights wrestling with it, trying to get a basic setup working before even thinking about how we would scale it across multiple environments.
But then came ArgoCD and Flux GitOps. These tools promised to simplify our deployment and configuration management by allowing us to manage our infrastructure as code. The idea of treating infrastructure like any other application was both exhilarating and daunting. We had a lot of legacy systems that were not designed with this in mind, so there was plenty of refactoring and rethinking needed.
During one particularly frustrating debugging session, I found myself arguing with a colleague about the best way to implement a feature using Kubernetes secrets. The conversation quickly devolved into a heated debate about whether it was better to use ConfigMaps or Secrets for storing sensitive information. In the end, we realized that there wasn’t necessarily a ‘right’ answer, and that sometimes the simplest solution is often the best one.
Meanwhile, in the hacker news world, stories like “Turning a MacBook into a Touchscreen with $1 of Hardware” were making waves. It was cool stuff, but it felt far removed from the real challenges we faced on a daily basis. The article about nushell and its attempts to create an interactive shell for modern data processing also piqued my interest. I found myself wondering how something like that could fit into our workflow at work.
The story of Google deleting an old Android app after 10 years was both humbling and a bit unsettling. It reminded me that even the giants in tech can make mistakes, and that it’s important to always be vigilant about security and data management.
As for the other stories on Hacker News, they all felt like different worlds away from our immediate concerns. Ebola being curable? I’m glad but not sure how many times I needed to read “thank you” to the scientists who made that happen. And Microsoft Encarta’s fate was a reminder of how technology evolves and what gets left behind.
Despite the distractions, I kept plugging away at my work. Debugging eBPF, arguing about Kubernetes secrets, and trying to implement GitOps tools. It felt like a mix of chaos and progress—like we were building something that could support our team for years to come, even if it wasn’t always smooth sailing.
In the end, August 26, 2019 was just another day in tech, but one filled with the promise of what was to come. The journey from platform engineering to SRE roles, and all the tools we were starting to use along the way, felt like a never-ending cycle of learning and adapting.
That’s where I was back then, wrestling with the complexities of modern infrastructure management. What about you? How are things in your world these days?