sathwick

This is the website of Sathwick.

  • We Replaced $10,000/Month of VPC Flow Logs With About $10 of S3. Here's How, and What We Gave Up.

    Network visibility is one of those line items nobody questions.

    Our VPC Flow Logs bill was about $10,000 a month. ALB access logs and conntrack summaries on NAT instances replaced most of it for about $5 to $10.

  • How I Built a PostgreSQL SSO Proxy from Scratch

    A company where developers and product managers are required to be given access to the production database to edit rows sounds like a compliance nightmare. It was, but that wasn’t the problem I was looking to solve. I wanted to solve the issue of how we used to provide this access to people: we gave them a password for a single database user that everyone used, including the microservices themselves, and that user had a permission set of GRANT ALL on the entire database.

  • Inside the Kubernetes Observability Pipeline: Logs, Events, and Metrics

    When you look at a Kubernetes dashboard, it is easy to think that logs, metrics, and Events simply flow from the cluster into the observability backend. In this article, ‘backend’ means Groundcover, the system that ingests, stores, and serves these signals for queries. In reality, each signal takes a very different path before it becomes something you can query or visualize.

    A container log may start as stdout or stderr, get written to a file on the node, picked up by an agent, parsed, enriched with Kubernetes metadata, passed through one or more collectors, batched, and finally exported to a backend. Kubernetes Events originate as API objects and are collected through the Kubernetes API. Metrics can come from Prometheus-style scraping, Kubernetes object state, node or application exporters, or directly through OTLP.

  • I Rebuilt YouTube's Load Balancing Algorithm in Go

    If you had to guess how a system like YouTube distributes traffic across millions of backend servers, you’d probably default to a classic approach like round-robin load balancing.

  • Claude Code's Hidden Features: Undocumented, Gated, and Internal Capabilities

    A source-based tour of Claude Code's undocumented, gated, and internal features, from hidden flags and slash commands to KAIROS, ULTRAPLAN, swarms, and bridge mode.

  • Reverse-Engineering Claude Code: A Deep Dive into Anthropic's AI-Powered CLI

    An exhaustive technical analysis of the architecture, systems, and engineering behind Claude Code — Anthropic's flagship developer tool.

  • Designing a URL Shortener for 1 Trillion URLs

    I’ve read multiple system design books, taken courses, and watched several playlists on YouTube. One of the most common and foundational system design questions that almost everyone starts with is the Bitly problem: designing a URL shortener that converts long URLs into shorter, more manageable links.

  • The Architecture of Copying and Pasting Images on the Web

    Copying an image from one website and pasting it to another. No downloads, no temporary files, no dragging things to your desktop. Just Ctrl+C -> Ctrl+V and the image shows up as if it teleported across the web.