Thirteen years of running in EC2.

Thirteen years of custom AMIs. Thirteen years of deployment pipelines put together with toothpicks and bubblegum. Thirteen years of launch scripts that really-do-seem-to-be-an-anti-pattern-but-hey-at-least-they-work.

And we threw it all away to run in EKS.

This is the choice we made at GumGum in early 2023, and this blog post covers the problems that led to this insane idea, and why this idea wasn’t so insane after all.

Solving IP exhaustion in EKS: Avoiding a network outage by implementing custom networking

Automatically open a PR on your GitOps repository when a third party service publishes an update

Pepr is on a mission to save Kubernetes from the tyranny of YAML, intimidating glue code, bash scripts, and other makeshift solutions.

The clusterSecret operator makes sure all the matching namespaces have the secret available and up to date.

An extremely fast directory and filename linter - Bring some structure to your project filesystem

Terminal based intercepting proxy written in rust with tmux and vim as user interface.

Transactional page storage engine supporting lazy partial replication to the edge. Optimized for scale and cost over latency. Leverages object storage for durability.

Automatically generates beautiful and easy-to-read ER diagrams from your database.

Managing over 165k cloud resources across hundreds of workspaces could seem daunting. But for us, it’s just another day at Benchling. Here’s how we do it.

We currently have:

- 165k cloud resources under management
- 625 Terraform workspaces
- 38 AWS accounts
- 170 engineers (40 of whom are infra specialists)

We perform:

- 225 infrastructure releases daily (terraform apply operations)
- 723 plans daily (terraform plan operations)

We’ve been successfully operating Benchling’s infrastructure release system for the past two years (spoiler, it’s Terraform Cloud), over which time we’ve doubled our infrastructure footprint with minimal additional release overhead.

OpenInfraQuote is a lightweight, open-source CLI tool for estimating infrastructure costs using Terraform plan and state files. It runs locally or in CI/CD. No backend, no API keys, no external services.

There are a few interesting scenarios to keep in mind when writing applications (not just databases!) that read and write files, particularly in transactional contexts where you actually care about the integrity of the data and when you are editing data in place (versus copy-on-write for example).

A journey into troubleshooting an insidious, and subtle, issue that may occur with Prometheus Recording Rules