Arionex
Field notes on building and running reliable internet services.
A Field Guide to Graceful Degradation
June 20, 2026
Every system has a sequence in which its features should die. Recommendations fail before checkout; search suggestions fail before search; thumbnails fail before the image. Writing that order down - and enforcing it with dependency-aware timeouts and bulkheads - is what separates a partial outage from a total one.
The implementation details matter less than the discipline: a fallback that is never exercised is not a fallback, it is a rumour. Chaos drills that kill your recommendation service at random force the degraded path to stay real.
Why Edge Caching Still Matters in 2026
August 27, 2026
Periodic declarations that edge caching is dead consistently overlook networking realities: fiber lines still obey physical constraints. Even with cheap bandwidth and fast runtimes, a round trip between Sao Paulo and Frankfurt easily consumes hundreds of milliseconds. No amount of runtime tuning can…
Structuring DNS for Reliability
September 23, 2026
Domain resolution outages produce an awkward paradox: server instances remain perfectly healthy while clients perceive complete downtime. Insulating against platform-level registrar outages demands secondary authoritative DNS providers operating over separate routing infrastructure.…
Multi-Region Failover Planning
May 5, 2026
Multi-region failover is mostly decided before the incident. The two questions that matter - how fresh does the standby data need to be, and who is allowed to press the button - sound managerial, but they drive every technical choice downstream from replication topology to health-check placement.…
Practical Notes on Postgres Connection Pooling
August 24, 2026
Postgres connections are heavy - each backend carries megabytes of memory and a full process - so every scaled-out installation grows a pooler, and every pooler grows a dialect. Session pooling is nearly transparent; transaction pooling is fast and unforgiving, quietly breaking session features like…
More reading
- Understanding TLS 1.3 Session Resumption — Security, July 22, 2026
- Email Deliverability: Authentication Beyond SPF — Email, June 29, 2026
- When to Choose a Queue Over a Request — Engineering, June 5, 2026
About us
Founded by former SREs and network engineers, our editorial desk focuses on the practical side of operating distributed services - less hype, more packet captures.