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246 posts tagged with "Engineering"

Engineering insights and technical deep dives

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The $2 Million Threshold: What Building Your Own Platform Actually Costs
·Dora Noda·9 min

The $2 Million Threshold: What Building Your Own Platform Actually Costs

A cloud bill supposedly needs to hit $2M a year before building your own platform beats renting one — except that $2M is platform-team payroll, not an infrastructure bill, and running a self-hosted PaaS on owned hardware gets the same capability for roughly a third to two-thirds of the cost.

cost-optimization
PaaS
self-hosting
engineering
Ceph Tentacle's FastEC vs MinIO's Maintenance Mode: What Self-Hosting Block and Object Storage Looks Like on a Cluster-API Fleet in 2026
·Dora Noda·9 min

Ceph Tentacle's FastEC vs MinIO's Maintenance Mode: What Self-Hosting Block and Object Storage Looks Like on a Cluster-API Fleet in 2026

Ceph Tentacle's FastEC cuts erasure-coding overhead for small block I/O by 2-3x. Worked out on real Hetzner-class hardware against 3x-replicated Longhorn, plus the January 2026 production incident that shows exactly how not to enable it.

self-hosting
PaaS
infrastructure
engineering
Docker Compose's models: Key Has Been in the Official Spec Since June 2025 — What That Means for a Compose-to-Cluster-API Build Step
·Dora Noda·9 min

Docker Compose's models: Key Has Been in the Official Spec Since June 2025 — What That Means for a Compose-to-Cluster-API Build Step

Docker Compose's models: key for defining AI models, agents, and MCP tools has quietly been part of the vendor-neutral Compose Specification since June 2025 — here's the exact YAML, and what it means for a git-push PaaS's build pipeline.

self-hosting
PaaS
AI
engineering
Dokploy Passed CapRover's GitHub Stars in Two Years, Not Nine
·Dora Noda·8 min

Dokploy Passed CapRover's GitHub Stars in Two Years, Not Nine

CapRover took nearly nine years to reach 15,109 GitHub stars. Dokploy passed that number in about two. The GitHub API data, and the Docker Compose gap behind it, explain why.

self-hosting
PaaS
developer tools
engineering
+1
The Deploy That Pointed at Nothing: Firetiger's CI Race Condition and the One Check That Would Have Stopped It
·Dora Noda·9 min

The Deploy That Pointed at Nothing: Firetiger's CI Race Condition and the One Check That Would Have Stopped It

A canceled CI build fooled Firetiger's deploy pipeline into shipping a container image ID that was never built, triggering an 8-hour ingest outage. Here's the exact failure chain, and the one registry check that would have caught it.

self-hosting
PaaS
infrastructure
engineering
Do You Still Need kubectl for Cluster API Fleet Management? Headlamp's New Plugin Says Mostly No
·Dora Noda·9 min

Do You Still Need kubectl for Cluster API Fleet Management? Headlamp's New Plugin Says Mostly No

Kubernetes retired its Dashboard and pointed operators at Headlamp's new Cluster API plugin — here's exactly what it replaces, what still needs kubectl and GitOps, and why bex should adopt it instead of building a bespoke fleet view.

self-hosting
PaaS
infrastructure
engineering
K3s vs K0s Under Cluster API: Which Lightweight Distro Actually Fits a Hetzner Fleet's Machine Lifecycle
·Dora Noda·9 min

K3s vs K0s Under Cluster API: Which Lightweight Distro Actually Fits a Hetzner Fleet's Machine Lifecycle

Most k3s-vs-k0s comparisons are written for a single Raspberry Pi. Under Cluster API on Hetzner, the real fork is where each distro puts your control plane — and it changes your upgrade and cert-rotation story more than either binary's size does.

self-hosting
PaaS
infrastructure
engineering
Kamaji Turns Kubernetes Control Planes Into Pods — But It Only Cuts the Control-Plane Bill, Not the Worker-Node One
·Dora Noda·9 min

Kamaji Turns Kubernetes Control Planes Into Pods — But It Only Cuts the Control-Plane Bill, Not the Worker-Node One

A worked cost model for Kamaji's Cluster API control-plane provider: what running tenant control planes as pods actually removes from a self-hosted fleet's bill, what it leaves untouched, and where its shared-kernel isolation stops being enough.

PaaS
self-hosting
infrastructure
cost-optimization
+1
Kamal Supports Cloud Native Buildpacks, Not Just Dockerfiles: What That Means for bex's Own Build Path
·Dora Noda·9 min

Kamal Supports Cloud Native Buildpacks, Not Just Dockerfiles: What That Means for bex's Own Build Path

Kamal, 37signals' zero-daemon deploy tool built specifically to avoid PaaS abstraction, now ships a pack builder option for Cloud Native Buildpacks alongside its default Dockerfile path. Here's the actual config, why a minimal-abstraction tool reached for a CNCF spec instead of writing its own builder, and what it means for bex's default.

self-hosting
PaaS
infrastructure
engineering
Showing 64–72 of 246 posts