Welcome to My Blog

Hey — I’m Jayakumar, a Site Reliability Engineer at Mastercard. I spend my days keeping production systems fast, resilient, and observable, and I decided it was time to write some of it down.

Why start a blog?

Three reasons:

1. Writing sharpens thinking. Explaining a postmortem or a Kubernetes quirk forces me to actually understand it.
2. It helps others. The blog posts that saved me at 3 AM were written by engineers who took the time to share.
3. It’s a record. A year from now, this is a snapshot of what I was learning.

What to expect

I’ll be writing about the things I work with day to day:

• Reliability — SLOs, error budgets, incident response, and blameless postmortems.
• Cloud & infrastructure — AWS/GCP/Azure, Terraform, and platform engineering.
• Kubernetes — the good, the sharp edges, and hard-won lessons.
• Observability — metrics, logs, traces, and cutting alert noise.
• Automation — killing toil with scripts, pipelines, and self-healing systems.

A quick example

Here’s the kind of thing I mean — a tiny kubectl alias I use constantly:

# Watch pods across all namespaces, refresh every 2s
alias kwatch='watch -n2 "kubectl get pods -A | grep -vE \"Running|Completed\""'

It only shows pods that are not healthy, which is exactly what you want during an incident.

Reliability isn’t the absence of failure — it’s the ability to recover quickly and learn from it.

Thanks for reading. More soon.