Digs

Searching X architecture returns material written to be found by that query, which means tutorials and vendor pages. The material worth having was written by an engineer explaining a real system to their peers, and it uses different words. A dig is what comes back from going after that layer on one topic: the architecture reconstructed across real systems, the decisions and the conditions that flip them, what actually broke, and numbers you can plan against. Every claim is graded, linked and dated.

92 field guides 2484 graded sources 424 postmortems 8 categories

Unit economics, capacity buying, and efficiency work measured in spend.

Cost & Efficiency 14 Oct 2026

The proxy beside every process: when the sidecar's bill came due

Reconstructs the cost of putting a proxy beside every workload from the teams that measured it: Istio's own versioned benchmarks, the MeshInsight study, Meta's library-first counterexample, and the incident re…

What surprised meThe organisations with the most traffic never paid the tax: Meta routes 99% of RPCs through an in-process library to save hundreds of thousands of ma…

29 sources · 26 organisations · 3 postmortems 29 min read
service-meshsidecaristioenvoykubernetes
Cost & Efficiency 03 Oct 2026

The compute you reserve but never use

Most containers use less than half of what they reserve, and the bill follows the reservation. This guide reconstructs the request/limit contract and its failure record from the primary sources this topic actu…

What surprised meThe reservation number is wrong in both directions at once: Datadog measures over 65% of containers using less than half their requested CPU, while t…

23 sources · 16 organisations · 3 postmortems 29 min read
kubernetescapacityutilizationfinopsthrottling
Cost & Efficiency 29 Sep 2026

The discount is a repossession clause

Every large cloud sells the same machines twice: firm capacity at list price and the same capacity at 60-91% off with the right to take it back on 30 to 120 seconds' best-effort notice. This guide reconstructs…

What surprised meAWS's own best-practices documentation strongly warns against the spot-with-on-demand-failover pattern for capacity-intolerant workloads, the exact p…

23 sources · 12 organisations · 3 postmortems 27 min read
spot-instancespreemptiblecapacitykubernetesautoscaling
Cost & Efficiency 23 Sep 2026

The meter runs on cardinality

Reconstructs the telemetry cost-containment funnel from the incident record at GitLab and Datadog, the pricing sheets of three clouds, Prometheus and OpenTelemetry source debates including a rejected pull requ…

What surprised meThe organisations that take observability most seriously throw almost everything away on purpose: Google's Dapper kept 1 trace in 1,024 and then samp…

37 sources · 20 organisations · 8 postmortems 35 min read
observabilitycardinalitytelemetrycostsampling
Cost & Efficiency 14 Sep 2026

The bill is not a brake

Reconstructs the spend-containment architecture from six published billing incidents (Milkie Way, Troy Hunt, the Netlify and empty-S3-bucket bills, Cara, the 2026 AWS estimates outage) and the platform mechani…

What surprised meThe hard cap was not never-built: Google built it, removed it (2019-2023) because its coverage could not keep up with the platform, and reintroduced …

34 sources · 31 organisations · 5 postmortems 36 min read
cloud-billingspend-capsdenial-of-walletserverlessquotas
Cost & Efficiency 30 Aug 2026

When owning hardware wins, and when it owns you

Dropbox banked an SEC-audited $74.6M by leaving S3; 37signals cut its bill from $3.2M to $1.3M on the way to deleting its AWS account; and in the same summer of 2025, Stack Overflow unracked its last server an…

What surprised meThe two most famous cloud skeptics of the 2010s swapped sides within weeks of each other in mid-2025, 37signals deleting its AWS account as Stack Ove…

29 sources · 25 organisations · 3 postmortems 32 min read
cloud-exitrepatriationtcounit-economicscapacity-planning
Cost & Efficiency 30 Aug 2026

Zone-local traffic and the cross-zone bill

Spreading across three availability zones is billed twice: in standing idle capacity, and at a cent per gigabyte for every crossing. This guide reconstructs, from Slack, DoorDash, Grab, Grafana Labs, Uber, Pol…

What surprised meMicrosoft deleted the charge entirely on 21 May 2024, so a whole body of engineering, a product category and three competing Kafka redesigns exist to…

34 sources · 21 organisations · 4 postmortems 44 min read
availability-zoneskuberneteskafkaenvoycloud-cost