Many, many pixels have been burned on the topic of sidecars of late.

If you’ve been paying any attention at all to the cloud-native ecosystem, you’ve doubtless run across discussions about the merits - or lack thereof - of sidecars. In a lot of ways, this is kind of silly: sidecars are a fairly low-level implementation pattern, and it would probably make sense to see them considered an implementation detail rather than the latest hot marketing topic. In other ways, though, we live in an imperfect world and we often do have to pull back the curtains to take a look at the technology underneath the tools we use: understanding the tradeoffs made by our tool choices is often critical to getting the most out of those tools, and architectural decisions are always about tradeoffs.

For various reasons, I ended up being the one to take on the job of pulling back the curtain on both Linkerd’s choice to use the sidecar pattern and Istio Ambient’s choice to avoid it, and look into the ramifications of those choices. I did this in the obvious way: I ran both meshes under load and measured things about them. It was simultaneously frustrating and fascinating, often in surprising ways.

Kubernetes Operator for Chisel

Set kubectl contexts/namespaces per shell/terminal to manage multi Kubernetes clusters at the same time, like kubectx/kubens but per shell/terminal.

rk8s is a lightweight, Kubernetes-compatible container orchestration system built on top of Youki, implementing the Container Runtime Interface (CRI) with support for three primary workload types: single containers, Kubernetes-style pods, and Docker Compose-style multi-container applications.

This interactive article allows you to build an understanding of what Processes are, how they allow your computer to multitask, and how they differ from Threads.

There are books & many articles online, like this one arguing for using Postgres for everything. I thought I’d take a look at one use case - using Postgres instead of Redis for caching. I work with APIs quite a bit, so I’d build a super simple HTTP server that responds with data from that cache. I’d start from Redis as this is something I frequently encounter at work, switch it out to Postgres using unlogged tables and see if there’s a difference.

pgschema is a CLI tool that brings terraform-style declarative schema migration workflow to Postgres

Prometheus exporter for PostgreSQL

IntelliShell is a powerful command template and snippet manager for your shell. It goes far beyond a simple history search, transforming your terminal into a structured, searchable, and intelligent library of your commands.

Terminal OpenAPI Spec viewer

High-performance read-through cache for object storage.

Metrics are the quantitative backbone of observability—the numbers that tell us how our systems are performing. This is the third post in our OpenTelemetry naming series, where we've already explored how to name spans and how to enrich them with meaningful attributes. Now let's tackle the art of naming the measurements that matter.

Understand Kubernetes monitoring metrics that help detect issues early, improve reliability, and keep your cluster performing at its best.

A comprehensive list of PostgreSQL 18 new features, performance optimizations, operational and observability improvements, and new tools for devs.

Elephantshark helps monitor, understand and troubleshoot Postgres network traffic: Postgres clients, drivers and ORMs talking to Postgres servers, proxies and poolers (also: standby servers talking to their primaries and subscriber servers talking to their publishers).