TLS/SSL Certificate Management: From Application to Auto-Renewal

Overview TLS/SSL Certificate Management: From Application to Auto-Renewal is an essential skill in SRE operations. In production environments, mastering these techniques can significantly improve system stability and operational efficiency. Why TLS/SSL Certificate Management Matters As systems grow in scale and complexity, traditional operations approaches struggle to meet the demands of modern distributed systems. TLS/SSL Certificate Management helps operations teams: Rapid Problem Resolution: Systematic tools and methods reduce troubleshooting time Improved System Visibility: Establish comprehensive monitoring and observability Proactive Fault Prevention: Identify and fix potential risks before they cause outages Resource Optimization: Allocate and schedule resources efficiently Core Concepts and Principles Basic Concepts The core of TLS/SSL Certificate Management lies in establishing standardized processes and automated toolchains....

September 14, 2025 · 3 mins · 569 words · XuBaojin

Nginx Performance Tuning: From Configuration to Kernel Parameters

Overview Nginx Performance Tuning: From Configuration to Kernel Parameters is an essential skill in SRE operations. In production environments, mastering these techniques can significantly improve system stability and operational efficiency. Why Nginx Performance Tuning Matters As systems grow in scale and complexity, traditional operations approaches struggle to meet the demands of modern distributed systems. Nginx Performance Tuning helps operations teams: Rapid Problem Resolution: Systematic tools and methods reduce troubleshooting time Improved System Visibility: Establish comprehensive monitoring and observability Proactive Fault Prevention: Identify and fix potential risks before they cause outages Resource Optimization: Allocate and schedule resources efficiently Core Concepts and Principles Basic Concepts The core of Nginx Performance Tuning lies in establishing standardized processes and automated toolchains....

September 12, 2025 · 3 mins · 570 words · XuBaojin

Linux System Call Tracing: strace and ltrace Debugging

Overview Linux System Call Tracing: strace and ltrace Debugging is an essential skill in SRE operations. In production environments, mastering these techniques can significantly improve system stability and operational efficiency. Why Linux System Call Tracing Matters As systems grow in scale and complexity, traditional operations approaches struggle to meet the demands of modern distributed systems. Linux System Call Tracing helps operations teams: Rapid Problem Resolution: Systematic tools and methods reduce troubleshooting time Improved System Visibility: Establish comprehensive monitoring and observability Proactive Fault Prevention: Identify and fix potential risks before they cause outages Resource Optimization: Allocate and schedule resources efficiently Core Concepts and Principles Basic Concepts The core of Linux System Call Tracing lies in establishing standardized processes and automated toolchains....

September 11, 2025 · 3 mins · 575 words · XuBaojin

Reliability Design for Multi-Region Active-Active Architecture

Overview When your business grows from “serving one city” to “serving the entire country” or even “serving globally,” single-datacenter architecture hits two hard constraints: latency from distance and single point of failure risk. Multi-region active-active architecture is the engineering solution to both problems. But active-active architecture is one of the most complex topics in SRE — it’s not simply “deploy the service in two datacenters.” It involves a series of deep engineering challenges: data consistency, traffic routing, failover, and operational complexity....

August 29, 2025 · 17 mins · 3513 words · XuBaojin

SRE and Development Team Collaboration Models: Engineering Practices for Breaking Down Walls

Overview In modern software engineering, the relationship between SRE (Site Reliability Engineering) and development teams is one of the most critical and delicate aspects. Development pursues “fast delivery of new features,” while SRE pursues “stable system operation” — these two goals are inherently in tension. If the collaboration model is poorly designed, the result ranges from inefficiency and finger-pointing to frequent production incidents and collapsed trust between teams. The Google SRE Book contains a classic observation: “The central SRE contradiction is that we need to simultaneously allow development teams to move quickly while maintaining the reliability of the system....

June 24, 2025 · 20 mins · 4224 words · XuBaojin

eBPF Programming Guide: From Principles to Production-Grade Tooling

Overview eBPF (Extended Berkeley Packet Filter) is one of the most revolutionary technologies in the Linux kernel over the past decade. It allows developers to safely and efficiently run custom programs in kernel space — without modifying kernel source code or loading kernel modules. From network packet filtering to syscall tracing, from performance analysis to security auditing, eBPF has become the cornerstone of modern observability and network data planes. This article starts with the fundamental principles of eBPF, progressively covering development environment setup, program type selection, a practical comparison between BCC and libbpf+CO-RE, and finally a complete production-grade eBPF tool development workflow....

April 1, 2025 · 18 mins · 3632 words · XuBaojin

Change Management: Canary Release and Rollback Strategies

The Role of Change Management in SRE Google SRE identified an iron rule: approximately 70% of production incidents are directly caused by changes. Whether it’s code deployment, configuration modification, infrastructure adjustment, or dependency upgrades, every change injects uncertainty into the system. Change management is therefore not bureaucratic red tape — it’s the first line of defense in SRE reliability engineering. The core objectives of change management can be summarized in three points:...

February 11, 2025 · 9 mins · 1902 words · XuBaojin

Blackbox Exporter: External Probing and Uptime Monitoring

Overview Prometheus’s conventional monitoring is “inside-out” — Prometheus scrapes Exporter metrics to understand internal system state. But when users access your service, they follow an “outside-in” path: DNS resolution → network routing → load balancing → backend service. A link that looks perfectly healthy from the inside may be completely inaccessible to users due to DNS misconfiguration, CDN cache issues, or expired SSL certificates. Blackbox Exporter solves the “external probing” problem....

February 4, 2025 · 12 mins · 2429 words · XuBaojin

Helm Chart Writing and Private Repository Management

Why Helm? Managing K8s applications with bare kubectl apply -f works at small scale, but as environments multiply (dev/staging/prod) and services grow, problems quickly surface: Hardcoded configuration: Each environment has its own YAML file with image tags, replica counts, and resource limits hardcoded. Changing a single value means editing ten files. No version management: Upgrades and rollbacks rely on manual records—no way to know what version was last deployed. No reusability: Deploying Redis and MySQL requires two completely different YAML sets with no way to templatize....

January 16, 2025 · 13 mins · 2653 words · XuBaojin

Linux Firewall: iptables/nftables from Beginner to Expert

Overview The Linux firewall has evolved from ipfwadm → ipchains → iptables → nftables. All are based on the Netfilter framework, but the higher-level syntax and management approach have continuously improved. This article starts from the Netfilter architecture and dives into iptables’ five chains and four tables, nftables’ advantages and usage, NAT/port forwarding, connection tracking, and production performance optimization. Netfilter Framework Architecture Overview Netfilter is a packet processing framework in the Linux kernel that implements packet filtering, address translation, connection tracking, and other functions by mounting hooks at key positions in the kernel network stack....

January 10, 2025 · 16 mins · 3292 words · XuBaojin