Lunarex
Field notes on building and running reliable internet services.
Why Edge Caching Still Matters in 2026
July 13, 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 outrun the wire.
Today's shift centers on the nature of cached payloads rather than the need for them. Modern architectures place dynamic API payloads and HTML shells at the edge using stale-while-revalidate patterns and tight expiration windows. The operational hurdle remains invalidation: purge mechanisms must propagate near-instantly, supported by surrogate keys or cache tags to handle complex dependency graphs.
What Good Observability Actually Looks Like
August 11, 2026
Unchecked dashboard proliferation creates visual noise without resolving production emergencies. Effective operational insight functions backward from triage: when an alert triggers and waking staff investigate, instrumentation must pinpoint modifications immediately.…
Managing Secrets Without Losing Sleep
July 5, 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.…
The Operator's Guide to Load Testing
April 10, 2026
Load tests fail to predict production for a consistent reason: the traffic shape is wrong. Uniform random requests against one endpoint tell you about that endpoint. The production killer is the burst of clients retrying in sync after a thirty-second blip, or the cache-cold crawl at 5 a.m. when the …
Multi-Region Failover Planning
May 25, 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.…
More reading
- A Practical Guide to API Rate Limiting — Engineering, September 13, 2026
- The Hidden Cost of Chatty Microservices — Engineering, April 17, 2026
- Zero-Downtime Deployments Without the Drama — Operations, April 28, 2026
About us
We are a small team of infrastructure engineers and technical writers. We publish what we learn running production systems: incident retrospectives, protocol deep-dives and tooling notes.