No apply button in a web UI
A convenience feature that mutates production is a blast-radius decision wearing a convenience costume.
Notes
Small pieces, kept close to the source
Short observations, links, and reminders that do not need to become an essay to be worth keeping.
Image digests over tags, always
A tag is a mutable pointer. Deploying by tag means you cannot state what is running.
Terraform state locking is not optional
Two engineers, one state file, no lock. The failure is exactly as bad as the documentation implies.
Accepted findings need a home
If there is no recorded way to accept a scan finding, engineers will find an unrecorded way.
Liveness probes versus model loading
An inference container that loads a large model at startup will be killed by an impatient liveness probe, repeatedly, forever.
Ansible and Terraform are not competitors
One creates resources, the other configures them. The confusion produces bad versions of both.
Teach reflog early
Beginners avoid branching because they are afraid of losing work. Reflog removes the fear.
Batch size and memory limit are the same setting
An inference service that occasionally batches large requests will evict itself, and the eviction looks like a mystery.
Right-sizing beats cleverness
The largest cost saving available at Adex was never architectural. It was instances sized against requests instead of usage.
Model version as a metric label
The cheapest instrumentation decision I have made, and the one I would keep first.
Dependency layers before source layers
ML images are large. Layer ordering decides whether a build is thirty seconds or eight minutes.
The diagram should be the source
The note that eventually became ARCH.