Drathion
Field notes on building and running reliable internet services.
Understanding TLS 1.3 Session Resumption
May 15, 2026
TLS 1.3 collapsed the handshake to a single round trip, but the real latency win for repeat visitors comes from resumption. A client presenting a valid pre-shared key can skip straight to encrypted application data, which on mobile networks can be the difference between a page that feels instant and one that feels broken.
The trade-off lives in forward secrecy. Tickets encrypted with a long-lived server key mean captured traffic can be decrypted later if that key leaks. Operators who care rotate ticket keys on a strict cadence - daily is common, hourly is not crazy - and accept the small CPU cost of more full handshakes.
Structuring DNS for Reliability
July 30, 2026
Domain resolution outages produce an awkward paradox: server instances remain perfectly healthy while clients perceive complete downtime. Insulating against platform-level registrar outages demands secondary authoritative DNS providers operating over separate routing infrastructure.…
A Field Guide to Graceful Degradation
August 6, 2026
Architectures need an explicit hierarchy of failure. Recommendation engines should yield before purchasing flows break; query auto-complete should disable before search fails; generated previews should drop before source content vanishes. Formulating this priority map and reinforcing it through isol…
Data Residency Basics for Global Teams
August 21, 2026
Compliance requirements concerning data residency typically surface late in development, casually framed around keeping regional information confined to a specific territory. That casual framing conceals significant complexity: geographic residency mandates architectural redesign rather than simply …
What Good Observability Actually Looks Like
May 8, 2026
Monitoring consoles sprawl uncontrollably while offering little insight during live incidents. True observability operates under inverted priorities: an on-call engineer gets paged, and telemetry systems must identify the root diff within sixty seconds.…
More reading
- Cache Invalidation Patterns That Survive Traffic — Data, June 19, 2026
- Managing Secrets Without Losing Sleep — Security, August 29, 2026
- Reading Latency Percentiles Without Fooling Yourself — Operations, April 30, 2026
About us
Founded by former SREs and network engineers, our editorial desk focuses on the practical side of operating distributed services - less hype, more packet captures.