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Infra, Simplified: What We Shipped This Week

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.

Observability & Monitoring

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

Deployed Grafana with Loki for log aggregation

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.

Configured service-level alerts for IOPS, CPU, and queue depth

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.

Fixed name resolution bugs in trace collection

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.

Infrastructure Cleanup & Optimization

DevOps

Platform Engineering

Culture and collaboration model

A discipline with clear deliverables (IDPs)

Dev + Ops responsibilities shared across teams

Platform team provides abstraction for Ops

Loose toolchains, team-specific setups

Standardized tooling and golden paths

Developers build their own pipelines

Developers consume pre-built pipelines

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

The Role of Internal Developer Platforms (IDPs)

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

Retired unused staging environments

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

Launched ephemeral environments for testing

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.

Resolved disk bloat in log-heavy systems

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.

CI/CD Enhancements

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

GitLab and GitHub runners deployed on new infrastructure

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.

Addressed stuck pipeline issues

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.

Improved pipeline alerting

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.

Security & Compliance
Hardened WAF rules to block known probing patterns

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

Cleaned up legacy DNS health checks

Found and disabled outdated checks that were still consuming resources and adding confusion during debugging.

Fixed reverse proxy header forwarding for OpenAPI docs

Corrected a missing header that was breaking documentation visibility.

Challenge of the Week
  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.

Choosing Developer Productivity Tools

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.

Coming Up Next Week
  • 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

Team Shoutout

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.

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