Infra, Simplified: What We Shipped This Week

Making Infra Simpler, Safer, and More Scalable – June 17, 2025

This week, the team focused on sharpening observability pipelines, eliminating infrastructure noise, improving database performance, and streamlining CI/CD workflows. The goal? Faster feedback loops, clearer alerts, and fewer surprises in production. Let’s dive into the highlights.

From noisy logs to structured insights — our move to a more composable, cost-efficient observability stack is in full swing.

Moved logs out of CloudWatch and into a centralized Grafana stack with Loki and Tempo. This gives us longer retention, richer filtering, and cuts recurring log ingestion costs.
Why? CloudWatch was becoming both expensive and hard to query across projects.

We've implemented granular alerts tied to workload patterns, including burst balance and disk queue depth.
Why? To reduce false positives and ensure we’re alerted before hitting resource limits.

Traces weren’t resolving correctly in one stack due to misconfigured DNS entries. Patched this by adjusting Tempo sidecar configs.
Why? Broken traces = blind spots in debugging. This one was quietly hurting visibility.

Rather than replacing DevOps, platform engineering complements it by scaling its principles through formal productization of internal tools and services.

Our infrastructure work this week focused on simplifying and securing the platform layer.

Cleaned up long-running resources that were no longer in use.
Why? Reduce AWS spend and security exposure from stale infrastructure.

Branch-based, short-lived environments are now enabled for testing infrastructure changes.
Why? These enable safer experimentation and help dev teams validate changes without touching shared environments.

A system had nearly a year of logs stored in ClickHouse by default. We implemented a 7-day retention policy to reclaim disk and align with usage.
Why? Storage costs were creeping up and queries were slowing down.

We made several meaningful improvements to our delivery pipelines this week.

Migrated runners to a cleaner setup within the dev cluster and ensured they're connected to autoscaling groups.
Why? Build queues were inconsistent, and this paves the way for smoother parallel job execution.

Investigated and resolved root causes for intermittent runner failures and job pending states.
Why? Developer velocity was taking a hit from unpredictable CI behavior. Fixing this was high-priority.

We’ve added missed heartbeat alerts and basic health checks to our CI monitoring layer.
Why? Visibility into stuck or failed pipelines now starts sooner.

Added application-layer filtering rules to proactively block common scanning behaviors.

Found and disabled outdated checks that were still consuming resources and adding confusion during debugging.

Corrected a missing header that was breaking documentation visibility.

1. Think product, not project: IDPs should have roadmaps, user research, and SLAs.

2. Standardize golden paths: Define opinionated workflows for common use cases.

3. Expose APIs, not just UIs: Allow CLI and automation access.

4. Invest in observability: Expose metrics and traces early.

5. Secure by default: Templates must enforce security policies.

6. Decouple runtime from interface: UI should not be tightly coupled with infrastructure providers.

One recurring challenge was tracing down subtle misconfigurations in Tempo's DNS resolution. The symptoms were small — missing traces — but the consequences were big in terms of lost observability. The fix was simple, but the diagnosis wasn’t.

Lesson: Good observability starts with observability of your observability tools.

• Roll out self-service dashboards for alerting and monitoring

• Automate cleanup of test environments on PR closure

• Begin rollout of cost dashboards segmented by team and environment

Kudos to the CI/CD squad for untangling the runner and pipeline mess so quickly. Also, whoever created that dashboard meme in Slack about log retention limits? Chef's kiss. You know who you are.