Arcanexis
Independent coverage of infrastructure, networking and data practice.
Multi-Region Failover Planning
June 22, 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.
Data is the long pole. Application tiers scale horizontally and redeploy anywhere in minutes; a two-hundred-gigabyte database does not. Asynchronous replication buys you availability at the price of a recovery-point gap, and knowing your actual tolerance for that gap - in minutes, in euros - changes which fancy technologies are even admissible.
Zero-Downtime Deployments Without the Drama
August 18, 2026
Popular engineering lore depicts seamless releases through elaborate blue-green switches and instantaneous traffic flips. Production reality centers on disciplined fundamentals: synthetic probes verifying realistic workloads, graceful connection draining on retiring nodes, and database schema mutati…
Understanding TLS 1.3 Session Resumption
July 14, 2026
While TLS 1.3 reduced initial connection setup to one round trip, reconnecting clients achieve their largest performance gains through session resumption. Supplying an established pre-shared key allows traffic to bypass negotiation and transmit payload immediately, transforming mobile load times fro…
HTTP/3 and QUIC: What Changed for Operators
May 10, 2026
Relocating the transport layer to userspace and wrapping headers in encryption makes QUIC a privacy milestone that complicates packet capture analysis. Metrics like congestion parameters and stream flow control are no longer readable off raw wire captures without decrypting via session secrets.…
Managing Secrets Without Losing Sleep
May 18, 2026
There are exactly two ages of secrets management: 'we keep them in an encrypted file' and 'we were audited'. The distance between them is covered by rotation policies, access trails, and the gradual realisation that humans should read production credentials roughly never.…
More reading
- Reading Latency Percentiles Without Fooling Yourself — Operations, August 10, 2026
- A Practical Guide to API Rate Limiting — Engineering, May 8, 2026
- What Good Observability Actually Looks Like — Operations, July 21, 2026
About us
Our contributors have spent years on-call for large platforms. This site collects the playbooks, postmortems and reference material we wish someone had handed us earlier.