Category
Pragmatic software architecture: decisions, trade-offs and patterns that scale.
Hybrid RAG in 2026 combines dense and lexical search fused with RRF, cross-encoder reranking over the top-50 candidates, structure-aware chunking, and continuous evaluation with Ragas or TruLens. It is the pattern that survives in serious production systems three years after the initial embeddings boom.
Kubernetes 1.35 GA consolidates three releases of work: native sidecars with full lifecycle management, generalised DRA for FPGAs and NPUs, and a scheduler that cuts resource waste by 15-25% in heterogeneous clusters. An operations-side balance sheet: what to enable now, what to watch before migrating, and what path to follow from 1.30.
Skills package reusable capabilities; subagents isolate bounded-task execution. Together they form the most effective pattern for composing complex agents in 2026.
The Model Context Protocol, proposed by Anthropic in late 2024 and adopted through 2025-2026 by Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, and the open-source community, already has proven operational patterns: separating generic servers from custom ones, explicit per-tool policies, credentials kept outside the model, prefixed composition, and contract tests. This is the state of the art in 2026.
Kubernetes won the orchestration battle, but Docker Swarm stays maintained inside Docker Engine and makes real sense for small teams without dedicated SRE, self-hosted stacks on 1-5 VPS, and edge mini-clusters. In those contexts, Swarm's minimal learning curve and low operational cost outweigh Kubernetes's advanced features.
Tres años después de que platform engineering se convirtiera en palabra de moda, el polvo ha caído. Unas pocas empresas tienen plataformas internas que de verdad aceleran al desarrollo, muchas montaron un portal Backstage vacío y algunas volvieron a DevOps clásico. Análisis de qué distingue a las que ganaron.
Six months after A2A landed at the Linux Foundation, and after several implementation cycles from Google, Microsoft, and open projects, what version 1 of the protocol means and whether it is safe to build on yet.
With MCP solving the agent-to-tool layer, a parallel problem surfaces: how do two agents from different vendors communicate with each other. Google's Agent2Agent protocol, donated to the Linux Foundation in June 2025, tries to fill that gap with an open standard.
Un enrutador de inferencia decide qué modelo atiende cada petición en función de coste, latencia y complejidad. Bien diseñados reducen la factura de tokens sin que el usuario perciba degradación; mal diseñados introducen fallos sutiles difíciles de depurar.
TigerBeetle is a distributed database written in Zig, specialized in one specific kind of workload: high-volume double-entry accounting with strong consistency guarantees. It does not aim to replace Postgres; it aims to be the right tool when the problem is counting financial transactions at millions per second without subtle failures.
After three years of expansion and an overheated ecosystem around the term, platform engineering enters 2025 in a consolidation phase. The internal platforms that survive are the ones that understood their real function; those that mistook the label for the solution are dismantling their teams or cutting them drastically.
Tras la adquisición por Microsoft en 2019, Citus vivió un limbo comercial que terminó con Microsoft abriendo el código completo en 2022. Tres años después, la extensión de particionado para Postgres ha madurado y ofrece una ruta práctica para escalar sin abandonar el motor que ya conoces. Un repaso honesto.
SQLite lleva años ganando terreno en servidores reales gracias a WAL, a proyectos como Litestream y libSQL, y a hardware con discos rápidos. Repaso los patrones que siguen funcionando después de varios años de uso, los que no, y por qué el tamaño medio de una aplicación web se come ya sin despeinarse.
After years of promising an open lakehouse, Apache Iceberg with REST catalogs plus dbt on top has jelled in 2025 into the reference stack. I break down what it solves, where it still hurts, and why the clean split between table, engine and transformation matters more than it looks.
DuckDB has spent two or three years quietly working its way into data architectures. It is no longer just the embedded database for local analytics: in 2025 it keeps turning up in concrete enterprise cases where it replaces far pricier pieces. A tour of the real patterns.
The term Agent OS has spent a year gaining traction across research and product circles. It describes a layer that goes well beyond an agent library: request scheduling, context management, persistent memory, and isolation. A look at the real state of that concept.
Redpanda promises Kafka-protocol compatibility without the JVM, without ZooKeeper, and with a thread-per-core architecture. By 2025 there are already serious production deployments. It is worth understanding where the switch pays off and where it does not.
Kubernetes 1.34 ships with Dynamic Resource Allocation (DRA) graduating to stable, scheduler improvements, and CEL-based mutating admission policies that replace webhooks. A practical rundown of what is safe to upgrade now, what can wait, and what actually changes for teams running production clusters.
Redis 8.2 ships vector search as a native data type. The real question is whether it replaces a dedicated engine like Qdrant, Weaviate, or pgvector on workloads with millions of vectors and tight latency budgets, or only works as a bonus on top of the cache you already run.
Six months after containerd 2.0 reached general availability there is enough real-world mileage to judge the migration from the 1.x branch in production. We cover what changes in the config file, what breaks on Kubernetes and Docker Swarm, and when planning the jump actually pays off.
Firecracker is the Rust-based virtual machine monitor AWS uses in Lambda and Fargate: it boots microVMs in under 125 milliseconds with under 5 MB of overhead. Switching from containers pays off when a shared kernel does not give enough isolation, especially for untrusted LLM agent code, and versus gVisor it wins on I/O performance.
Kubernetes 1.32 Penelope shipped in December and has been running in clusters for several months. It is a good time to look at which changes have aged well, which created extra work, and what lessons to carry into the jump to 1.33.
PostgreSQL 17 llegó en septiembre con mejoras silenciosas del planificador. Seis meses en producción confirman que los escaneos SAOP, el streaming I/O y los anti-joins han cambiado planes de consulta reales sin tocar una línea de SQL.
Coolify delivers a Vercel- or Heroku-like experience on your own servers: automatic HTTPS, managed databases, and branch previews without per-build or bandwidth fees. After several months using it on production VPS, here is where it shines, where it still has rough edges, and which teams will genuinely benefit from it.
GraphRAG has been in real enterprise use for over a year: during indexing, an LLM builds a knowledge graph that answers global questions about a corpus well, precisely where classic RAG fails because no single chunk holds the full answer. Here I compare indexing costs, the cases where it pays off, and the hybrid pattern that teams have settled on.
Cloudflare Workers turned eight in 2025 without slowing down: it now ships D1 for databases, R2 for egress-free storage, Durable Objects for distributed state, and Workers AI for running models without managing GPUs. It remains the fastest option for edge logic; for large in-memory processes or strict global consistency, other platforms fit better.
Kubernetes 1.30, released in April 2024, brings ValidatingAdmissionPolicy to general availability, eliminating the need for external webhooks for CEL-based admission policies. It adds pod scheduling readiness to control when a pod enters the scheduling cycle, and job success policy to define which index combination counts as success in distributed indexed Jobs.
Kubecost and OpenCost map real costs to namespaces, deployments, and labels in Kubernetes. OpenCost, the Apache 2.0 open-source core, covers essentials for free. Kubecost adds multi-cluster visibility and advanced cloud billing. For clusters spending over $5,000/month the ROI is clear: identified savings typically exceed software cost within the first month.
Cloudflare Workers is no longer an isolated edge function. In 2024, together with KV, D1, R2, and Durable Objects, it forms a complete platform that matches AWS on latency and drops egress fees, though it still falls short on long-running compute and the mature managed databases AWS offers.
In 2024, the sidecar-or-not debate has an answer: Istio Ambient Mesh and Cilium Service Mesh bring sidecarless architecture to production, while Linkerd keeps ultra-light Rust sidecars. The right choice depends on your current CNI, the features you need, and the size of your ops team, not on which project wins in the abstract.
Redis moved to dual SSPL/RSAL licensing in March 2024, no longer meeting the OSI open-source definition. Valkey emerged as a BSD 3-Clause fork backed by AWS, Google Cloud, Oracle, and the Linux Foundation, fully protocol-compatible with Redis 7.2. Migrating is almost always trivial: swap the binary or the Docker image.
cAdvisor is still embedded in kubelet and covers surface metrics, but falls short for production Kubernetes. The modern minimum stack pairs it with kube-state-metrics, node-exporter, Prometheus, and Grafana as a base, eBPF for deep network and syscall visibility, and OpenTelemetry for application context.
PostgreSQL 17, released in September 2024, cuts vacuum memory use by up to 20x, adds slot synchronization so logical replication survives a failover without a full resync, ships JSON_TABLE as standard SQL:2023 syntax, and introduces streaming I/O to speed up sequential scans. Teams running Postgres in production should start testing it in staging.
PostgreSQL 16 closes the historical gaps in logical replication: parallel apply near 2x faster, logical slots served from physical standbys, and the scaffolding for bidirectional replication. The result is a first-line tool for cross-version migrations and CDC pipelines.
Containerising SCADA makes sense for the upper architecture layers: HMI, historians, and data gateways. PLCs still control hardware with hard determinism. The biggest risk is cultural: applying DevOps patterns without adapting to OT context causes incidents. NIS2 requires managing containers as any other critical infrastructure asset.
Cilium Service Mesh replaces Istio or Linkerd sidecars with eBPF in the kernel: it handles policy, WireGuard encryption, and Hubble observability without a per-pod proxy, cutting memory overhead from roughly 100 GB to about 5 GB in a 100-node cluster. It suits large clusters with teams comfortable with eBPF.
SQLite in production is more viable than most teams assume. WAL mode removes read contention, Litestream replicates the WAL to S3 in near-realtime, and LiteFS adds multi-node replication. Without a separate database server, apps like Tailscale and PocketBase already do this in production. This article explains when it makes sense and its real limits.
Linkerd is the pragmatic service mesh for Kubernetes, prioritizing simplicity over feature catalogues. Its Rust proxy uses ~10 MB RAM per sidecar versus 50-100 MB for Envoy under Istio. This comparison explains when adopting it pays off, what it costs to operate, and when Istio makes more sense.
An Internal Developer Platform (IDP) centralises service discovery, provisioning and observability in a single portal, so developers stop depending on stale wikis and Slack channels. Backstage, Port and Cortex dominate the market: Backstage is open source with a dedicated team, Port is fast low-code SaaS, and Cortex focuses on scorecards for measurable technical discipline based on team size.
pgvector matured in 2023-2024 with the HNSW index type and parallel construction that arrived in version 0.6. For projects already running PostgreSQL, a dedicated vector database is not needed in most cases: this guide explains when PostgreSQL is enough, how to configure the index, and where it starts to fall short.
SQLite and DuckDB are both embedded databases that work from a single file, no server needed. Their architecture differs: SQLite stores rows and excels at short transactions (OLTP); DuckDB stores columns and shines at large-scale analytics (OLAP). Choosing the right one, or combining both, delivers a genuine technical edge.
ArgoCD has established GitOps as the standard deployment practice for Kubernetes: the Git repository is the single source of truth for the desired state, and the agent continuously reconciles the cluster. This guide covers the four formal GitOps principles, sync policies, common production mistakes, and a comparison with Flux.
A service mesh adds mTLS, uniform observability, and traffic management between microservices without modifying application code. The ecosystem has consolidated: Istio is the most complete and complex, Linkerd prioritises simplicity with Rust proxies, and Cilium delivers sidecarless service mesh via eBPF.
Backstage is the open-source platform from Spotify for building Internal Developer Platforms: a web portal (Node.js + React) that centralises service catalogs, scaffolding, and technical documentation. Adopted by Netflix, American Airlines, and hundreds of companies since 2020, it needs 1-3 dedicated engineers and pays off for organisations with more than 50 developers.
eBPF is a Linux kernel technology that lets you load and run verified, high-performance programs without recompiling the kernel or rebooting the system. It runs safely inside a virtual machine in the kernel and underpins tools such as Cilium, Pixie, Falco, and Tetragon for real-time tracing, networking, and security.
Vector databases have gone from an experimental curiosity to the central component of most LLM-based products. This comparison covers Qdrant, Pinecone, and Weaviate: architecture, strengths, limitations, and a decision tree for choosing the right option based on your operational priorities and budget.
PostgreSQL 16, released in September 2023, adds logical replication from a standby, the pg_stat_io view for breaking down I/O by operation type and context, and parallel FULL OUTER JOIN support. Upgrading from 15 is straightforward; 13 loses support in November 2025, so plan the update soon.
Chroma is the easiest vector database to get started with embeddings and semantic search: install it with pip install chromadb, no extra infrastructure required, and it exposes a minimal API (add, query, delete). It suits prototypes and mid-sized RAG systems well; past a few million vectors, Qdrant or Milvus scale better.
