Matty Stratton

"seeing someone or something doing something or solving the incident and just watching it is not the same as doing it." @sylvainkalache on AI handling incidents, on Arrested DevOps. arresteddevops.com/ai-and-in…

Two products launched the same day last week to restore-test your Postgres backups automatically. The market is now selling restore drills because we collectively refused to do them. A tool can run the drill. It can't make anyone read the report. stormatics.tech/blogs/postgr…

New Arrested DevOps: I had Sylvain Kalache (@sylvainkalache, runs the AI lab at Rootly) on to talk AI and incidents: what AI SRE tools are good at, and what happens to responders when the robot takes every easy incident. arresteddevops.com/ai-and-in…

I used to post on social media all the time about tech and DevOps culture and all that kind of stuff, and now it seems like the only thing that I want to post about is lifting weights. lol

Hit a new PR today … 350lb deadlift. This was set 5 of 3 reps…tried to squeak in a 4th one but it wasn’t happening 😂

Marino Wijay (@virtualized6ix) on the show: "Tech has been the largest accounting hack ever." His case: VCs hedging across five companies on the same non-problem, and a tax structure that rewards hiring tech people either way. arresteddevops.com/wtf-is-go…

"You're comparing your own friction points with everyone else's highlights." @DevOpsJacquie on why every launch makes it look like everyone else learned the new thing last night. From the episode: arresteddevops.com/meaningfu…

New on Arrested DevOps: @DevOpsJacquie and I talk about keeping meaningful control over the tools you depend on. Know what they're tied to, verify they do the job, and have a realistic way out. arresteddevops.com/meaningfu…

pgvector 0.8.7 fixes CVE-2026-103484. Any database user who can create an IVFFlat index can write out of bounds in the backend, which can get you to arbitrary code execution. Every version through 0.8.6 is affected. thebuild.com/blog/the-vector… Upgrade. That part’s easy. Christophe Pettus spends the rest of the post on the harder questions, mostly: who can actually reach this in a real deployment, and what does “a user who can create an index” mean when your app has one database role that does everything. I’ll argue for consolidating onto Postgres in most rooms I walk into. This is the invoice that comes with that position. Your attack surface is the union of every extension you installed. Each one has its own release cadence, its own maintainer bandwidth, and its own relationship with the word “soon.” Core Postgres has thirty years of security process behind it. The extension you added in a sprint last spring might have one person with a day job. That’s a tradeoff I’ll still take. It’s not a free one. Do you know the installed version of every extension in your production cluster right now, or are you about to go find out?

Your nightly backup is evicting your working set and you probably haven’t measured it. clickhouse.com/blog/direct-i… A backup reads every byte of a live database off the same drives answering your queries. By default Linux caches all of it, in case someone asks for those bytes again. Nobody will. To make room, the kernel throws out pages Postgres was about to use, and the next query goes to disk. Their test box: 48 vCPU, four NVMe drives, 467 GB database under live load. The buffered backup evicted all 40 GiB of a warm table that was sitting idle and not involved in the backup at all. With direct I/O: evicted nothing, finished in 71 seconds, roughly two thirds less latency impact, about 14% less CPU. The catch is what makes this cool. Direct I/O also turns off kernel readahead, so a small read keeps one drive busy while three sit idle. You have to size each read to span the whole RAID0 stripe and scale reader count to the hardware. The flag alone makes things worse. Nice writeup. Go look at what your backup window does to your cache hit rate.