Infrastructure
Infrastructure technologies, platforms, and best practices for building reliable systems
Infrastructure
Infrastructure covers the foundational technologies and platforms that support application deployment, monitoring, scaling, and reliability. This section provides guides on key infrastructure components used in modern systems.
Topics
ELK Stack
Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana for log management and search
Containerization
Docker and Kubernetes for container orchestration
Message Queues
Kafka, RabbitMQ for asynchronous messaging
Monitoring
Prometheus, Grafana for infrastructure monitoring and alerting
Infrastructure as Code
Terraform, Ansible for automated infrastructure provisioning
Service Mesh
Istio, Linkerd for mTLS, traffic management, and observability
Secret Management
HashiCorp Vault for centralized secret storage, dynamic credentials, and rotation
API Gateway
Kong, Envoy, Traefik - the front door for your services with auth, rate limits, and routing
CI/CD Platforms
GitHub Actions and GitLab CI in depth - pipelines, OIDC, runners, deployment patterns
Feature Flags
LaunchDarkly, Unleash, OpenFeature - decouple deployment from release with targeted rollouts
Cache
Redis and Memcached - in-memory caching, patterns, and avoiding classic cache pitfalls
CDN
Cloudflare, Fastly, CloudFront - global edge caching, image optimization, DDoS protection
DNS
Records, zones, TTL, anycast, propagation - the original distributed system, still in your critical path
Search
Algolia, Meilisearch, Typesense - typo-tolerant instant search beyond Elasticsearch
Edge Functions
Cloudflare Workers, Vercel Edge, Deno Deploy - code running at the CDN edge, near every user
Object Storage
S3, R2, GCS, MinIO - blob storage at unlimited scale, the backbone of modern data persistence
Tracing
OpenTelemetry, Jaeger, Tempo - see how a request flows across services; the third pillar of observability
Identity & Auth
Auth0, Clerk, WorkOS, Keycloak - user identity, SSO, OAuth/OIDC, SCIM; don't build your own
Background Jobs
Sidekiq, BullMQ, Celery, Temporal - task queues, retries, scheduled work, durable workflows
Vector Databases
Pinecone, Qdrant, Weaviate, pgvector - semantic search, RAG, the storage layer for embeddings
Email & Communication
Resend, SendGrid, SES, Postmark, Twilio - transactional email, SMS, push, deliverability
VPN & Zero Trust
Tailscale, WireGuard, Cloudflare Tunnel - private networking without perimeter VPN
Static Site Hosting
Cloudflare Pages, Vercel, Netlify - host frontends with edge CDN, preview deploys, and edge functions
Stream Processing
Flink, Kafka Streams, Materialize - continuous computation over events in motion
Chaos Engineering
Chaos Mesh, Litmus, Gremlin - inject controlled failure to find weaknesses before they find you
FinOps & Cloud Cost
OpenCost, Kubecost, Vantage, Cloudability - bring engineering, finance, and product together to spend cloud dollars wisely
Time-Series Databases
InfluxDB, TimescaleDB, VictoriaMetrics, QuestDB - purpose-built storage for timestamps, metrics, sensors, and event streams
GitOps
ArgoCD, Flux, Jenkins X - declarative continuous delivery where Git is the source of truth for what runs in production
Policy as Code
OPA, Kyverno, Cedar, Sentinel - express security, compliance, and operational rules as version-controlled code
Observability Pipelines
Vector, OpenTelemetry Collector, Fluent Bit, Cribl - route, transform, sample, and reduce telemetry between producers and backends
Internal Developer Platforms
Backstage, Port, Cortex, Humanitec - service catalogs, golden paths, and self-service portals that turn infrastructure into a product
Supply Chain Security
Sigstore, Cosign, SBOM, SLSA, in-toto - prove what is in your artifacts and that they came from where you think they did
Disaster Recovery & Backup
Velero, Restic, snapshot patterns, cross-region replication, RTO/RPO - getting back online when things go very wrong
WAF, DDoS & Bot Management
Cloudflare, AWS WAF, Akamai, Imperva - edge security for the public web; filtering attacks before they hit your origin
Data Warehouses & Lakehouses
Snowflake, BigQuery, Databricks, ClickHouse, Redshift - column-oriented storage and compute for analytics over billions of rows
Workflow Orchestration
Airflow, Dagster, Prefect, Argo Workflows - scheduling, dependency management, and observability for DAG-based pipelines
MLOps & AI Infrastructure
MLflow, Kubeflow, Ray, BentoML, vLLM, SageMaker - training, serving, monitoring, and lifecycle for ML and AI workloads
Container Runtime Security
Falco, Tetragon, Tracee, eBPF-based detection - catch what supply-chain checks and admission policies miss, at runtime