Category
Pragmatic software architecture: decisions, trade-offs and patterns that scale.
Hybrid search combines BM25 and vector retrieval to cover what each misses alone. Vectors fail on exact identifiers like SKUs or CVEs; BM25 fails when query and document use different vocabulary for the same idea. Reciprocal Rank Fusion (RRF) merges both rankings without depending on their score scales.
Model Context Protocol (MCP) is the open standard Anthropic published on 25 November 2024 to connect language models with external data and tools over JSON-RPC 2.0. It does not replace function calling: it standardises the server side, aiming to become for context what the Language Server Protocol is for code editors.
MariaDB 11.7 (November 2024) adds native vector search with an HNSW index, JSON improvements via JSON_OBJECT_AGG, and 5-15% faster read workloads versus 11.5. Against MySQL 8, the edge is not depending on HeatWave for embeddings; against PostgreSQL, it still trails on JSON depth and data types.
DuckDB es el motor analítico embebido que ha cambiado el panorama. Lee Parquet y CSV directamente, vectoriza la ejecución y cabe dentro de tu proceso Python. Un repaso a cuándo sustituye de verdad a un data warehouse.
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.
vLLM serves language models on GPU using PagedAttention and continuous batching, two techniques that multiply throughput compared with a naive server. It exposes an OpenAI-compatible API, so migrating an existing application only requires changing the base URL and deploying the right binary.
Tras dos años de RAG en producción, patrones claros emergen: chunking inteligente, hybrid search, re-ranking, evaluación continua. Qué evitar.
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.
Litestream is an open-source tool that replicates a SQLite database to an S3 bucket in near real time by reading the WAL SQLite already writes. It offers point-in-time recovery, overhead of only 1 to 3% CPU, and replaces the need for a separate database server in small apps.
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.
Kubernetes 1.31 brings no fireworks, but it closes old debts: AppArmor reaches GA, native sidecars now run enabled by default on their way to stable in 1.33, and DRA moves through alpha toward beta. A practical review from the perspective of someone operating clusters in production.
OpenTelemetry declared logs signals stable in July 2024. The third pillar of modern observability finally joins metrics and traces under a single protocol and a shared data model.
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.
This guide installs PostgreSQL 16 with pgvector on Debian or Ubuntu using the official PGDG repository, creates a dedicated role and database, tunes memory for production, and explains when the HNSW index beats IVFFlat depending on vector volume and the available maintenance window.
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.
