What gets published here
The rules this site is written under, and what has to be true before anything goes up.
downstack works on the long-lived connection between a device on a bad network and the infrastructure behind it, at both ends of it.
This is where the writing goes. It is worth saying up front what will be here and what will not, because the rules are the point.
We write about what broke. Vendor benchmarks publish the ceiling. Almost nobody publishes the road to it: the walls hit on the way, each one somewhere other than where the team expected to look. On the way to a million concurrent connections, four of the five ceilings were below the broker, and two of those were at the load balancer (Acing 1 Million Concurrent MQTT Connections, published 2022-04-15). That is the more useful half of the story and it is the half that usually goes unwritten.
Every number carries its date and its source. A figure without a date is not usable in a meeting, so it does not survive into anything published here. If a number came from somewhere, the link is in the text rather than in a footnote nobody opens.
Claims are graded. Observed means we saw it. Stated means someone said it. Inferred means we reasoned to it. Keeping those three visibly separate is slower to write and much faster to trust.
We say what is not ours. Where the evidence runs out, the writing says so. Conceding a boundary early is what makes the rest of it believable.
There is not much here yet. This section stays short rather than gets filled: something lands when there is a thing that broke, a number we can date, and a source you can open.