Services

Resources

Company

Our Work

Blog

Schedule a Meet

Pragmatic Software Engineering Stories,

Read PSES

The database that was quietly eating itself

Sometimes, it's the long-standing, slow-burning incidents that are most difficult to debug. Here's one story of such an incident. The engineering team has been seeing P50, P90, and P99 response time alerts firing regularly, where the APIs are slow. You investigate why... You're working as an SRE at a B2B SaaS company in HR tech space.

Read PSES

Debugging a website that worked on every device except mine

Debugging a website that worked on every device except mine. Storytime! Colleague: Hey, can anyone help? I can't access go.dev on my work laptop. Tried different browsers, cleared DNS cache, nothing works.

Read PSES

A curious case of Postgres choosing the wrong index

It’s a regular weekday. You're catching up on Slack, sipping your morning coffee. Then pings start coming in. A core feature on the user dashboard is down for some users. Not flaky. Down. In peak traffic hours. Support is escalating. You’re on call that week. You jump in.

Read PSES

Data engineering mystery - rerouting large data in Kafka

You're a tech lead handling a large-scale data pipeline. One day, your colleague (C) pulls you into an issue related to Kafka. Here's the conversation with your colleague.

Read PSES

The Mystery of Failing Database Writes

As an SRE at a growth-stage company, you're on call this week. A PagerDuty alert wakes you up. It's related to the main transactional database, so you check immediately.

Read PSES

A story about a nightmare scenario for every SRE

Story time, it's about cloud security failures and why good engineering practices matter, especially during the One to N journey. As a team lead, you're woken up by an AWS billing alarm!

Read PSES

Curious case of debugging failing webhook API requests

A short debugging story to start off the new year. Dev: Our backend has a webhook API that a third party will invoke over the internet. The customer team from that third party is on the call. They are getting a 500 error when making this API call.

Read PSES

A curious story of debugging Machine Learning model performance

You're woken up by a p90 latency-related alert. This alert is for the main API service, so you start investigating right away.

Read PSES

Database Reliability - Migrating Terabyte from self-hosted MySQL to GCP CloudSQL

You're a lead SRE and CTO asks you to manage and scale a self-managed 6-node MySQL cluster with 1.5+ TB data on production. You do what it takes, a few months pass, but now, it's time to move to a managed service. You think this should be straightforward, but it's not so easy.

Read PSES

Database Reliability - Zero Downtime Schema Migrations with MySQL

You join a team as lead SRE, and the CTO asks you to manage and scale a self-managed 6-node MySQL cluster on production.

Read PSES

Migrating Terabytes of metrics data with zero downtime

You're an SRE responsible for VictoriaMetrics deployment with 30 Million time series/min. The CTO wants you to drastically reduce the costs for this infra without compromising reliability.

Read PSES

Building Pull Request-based ephemeral Preview environments on Kubernetes

A CTO of a company calls you. They just migrated from Heroku to AWS on EKS. He's happy with the migration but wants you to build Heroku's "Ephemeral Preview Apps" on Kubernetes.

Read PSES

My app is slow. Can you fix it?

A founder of a recently funded company calls you. He wants you to come in and fix webapp performance problems. You have been in similar situations before and want another thrill, so you say:

Read PSES

Taming GCP networking cloud costs

Here's a story of a pragmatic tech lead who understands networking fundamentals like iptables, packet routing and NAT saved thousands of $$$ on cloud costs.

Read PSES

A case of Terabyte scale backup and recovery solution

You are a tech lead who's tasked to backup 1.5TB (yes, not a typo, a terabyte) of data DAILY to S3. You're not really sure about any other background about this requirement, so you start asking some questions:

Read PSES

Not all debugging stories have a happy ending

Sometimes you have to decide what problems are worth solving and only focus on those. You migrate application services running on VMs to K8s. Everything works fine, except for one service.

Read PSES

A curious case of slow APIs

You're a tech lead who's just joined a team and on your first day, the CTO tells you: "Our video processing API is very slow, looks like it's a problem with AWS EFS that we are using. Take a look and fix it."

Read PSES

Unblocking Team members

Teammate(T): Hey, I am blocked since I don't have AWS access credentials for the last 2 days. I am unable to proceed with any work. You: Well, have you raised a request to get the credentials?

Subscribe for more such content

Get the latest in software engineering best practices straight to your inbox. Subscribe now!

Subscribe for more such content

Get the latest in software engineering best practices straight to your inbox. Subscribe now!

Subscribe for more such content

Get the latest in software engineering best practices straight to your inbox. Subscribe now!

Subscribe for more such content

Get the latest in software engineering best practices straight to your inbox. Subscribe now!

Blogs.

Read Blog

Shooting ourselves in the foot by enabling Spring Kafka batching

Mahesh Aravind

SDE @One2N

We enabled Spring Kafka batch listeners to improve throughput and broke non-blocking retries. Here is how Kafka producer batching (batch.size, linger.ms) actually solved our problem and when batch listeners are the right choice.

March 16, 2026 | 4 min read

Read Blog

Why your Architecture should start with Questions, not boxes

Chinmay Naik

CEO @One2N

TL;DR: Architecture should start by asking constraint questions about volume, scale, team skills, budget, and business goals, not by copying what big tech does. Use curious questions ("Help me understand why?") instead of performance questions ("Why didn't anyone think of this?"). Stay with systems long enough to see them fail in production to learn which questions actually matter.

March 5, 2026 | 4 min read

Read Blog

Gitops for Kafka in the real world: How we governed 78 clusters without breaking production

Harshwardhan Mehrotra

SRE @One2N

This post is about how we, as a lean platform engg team used gitops and jikkou to bring 78 kafka clusters under control, cut ticket based changes from days to minutes, and kept legacy kafka 0.8.2 clusters safe in production.

February 16, 2026 | 4 min read

Read Blog

Prayogshala - The Engineering Laboratory at One2N

Chinmay Naik

CEO @One2N

We created Prayogshala, One2N’s internal engineering lab, to capture our learnings, experiments and knowledge base. See how it helps engineers get better by asking "why" before "how".

February 2, 2026 | 4 min read

Read Blog

The Gotchas of OTEL collector processors for effective observability in K8s

Sanket Rajgiri

SRE @One2N

Spandan Ghosh

Content @One2N

Struggling to make sense of OpenTelemetry Collector processors for real-world projects? This blog breaks down what each OTEL processor actually does, where it matters, and shares real lessons from messy SRE problems like taming noisy data, surviving crashes, and staying under cost limits in Kubernetes.

January 26, 2026 | 6 min read

Read Blog

How Queueing Theory Makes Systems Reliable

One2N

Team

Learn how SREs use queueing theory to explain why 70 percent utilisation feels calm, 90 percent feels cursed, and how the same math helps you choose headroom, tame retries, and protect your error budget before incidents hit.

December 17, 2025 | 2 min read

Blogs

Blogs.

Read Blog

Shooting ourselves in the foot by enabling Spring Kafka batching

Mahesh Aravind

SDE @One2N

We enabled Spring Kafka batch listeners to improve throughput and broke non-blocking retries. Here is how Kafka producer batching (batch.size, linger.ms) actually solved our problem and when batch listeners are the right choice.

March 16, 2026 | 4 min read

Read Blog

Why your Architecture should start with Questions, not boxes

Chinmay Naik

CEO @One2N

TL;DR: Architecture should start by asking constraint questions about volume, scale, team skills, budget, and business goals, not by copying what big tech does. Use curious questions ("Help me understand why?") instead of performance questions ("Why didn't anyone think of this?"). Stay with systems long enough to see them fail in production to learn which questions actually matter.

March 5, 2026 | 4 min read

Read Blog

Gitops for Kafka in the real world: How we governed 78 clusters without breaking production

Harshwardhan Mehrotra

SRE @One2N

This post is about how we, as a lean platform engg team used gitops and jikkou to bring 78 kafka clusters under control, cut ticket based changes from days to minutes, and kept legacy kafka 0.8.2 clusters safe in production.

February 16, 2026 | 4 min read

Blogs

Blogs.

Read Blog

Shooting ourselves in the foot by enabling Spring Kafka batching

Mahesh Aravind

SDE @One2N

We enabled Spring Kafka batch listeners to improve throughput and broke non-blocking retries. Here is how Kafka producer batching (batch.size, linger.ms) actually solved our problem and when batch listeners are the right choice.

March 16, 2026 | 4 min read

Read Blog

Why your Architecture should start with Questions, not boxes

Chinmay Naik

CEO @One2N

TL;DR: Architecture should start by asking constraint questions about volume, scale, team skills, budget, and business goals, not by copying what big tech does. Use curious questions ("Help me understand why?") instead of performance questions ("Why didn't anyone think of this?"). Stay with systems long enough to see them fail in production to learn which questions actually matter.

March 5, 2026 | 4 min read

Read Blog

Gitops for Kafka in the real world: How we governed 78 clusters without breaking production

Harshwardhan Mehrotra

SRE @One2N

This post is about how we, as a lean platform engg team used gitops and jikkou to bring 78 kafka clusters under control, cut ticket based changes from days to minutes, and kept legacy kafka 0.8.2 clusters safe in production.

February 16, 2026 | 4 min read

Blogs

Services

Resources

Company

Pragmatic Software Engineering Stories,

The database that was quietly eating itself

Debugging a website that worked on every device except mine

Debugging a website that worked on every device except mine. Storytime! Colleague: Hey, can anyone help? I can't access go.dev on my work laptop. Tried different browsers, cleared DNS cache, nothing works.

A curious case of Postgres choosing the wrong index

It’s a regular weekday. You're catching up on Slack, sipping your morning coffee. Then pings start coming in. A core feature on the user dashboard is down for some users. Not flaky. Down. In peak traffic hours. Support is escalating. You’re on call that week. You jump in.

Data engineering mystery - rerouting large data in Kafka

You're a tech lead handling a large-scale data pipeline. One day, your colleague (C) pulls you into an issue related to Kafka. Here's the conversation with your colleague.

The Mystery of Failing Database Writes

As an SRE at a growth-stage company, you're on call this week. A PagerDuty alert wakes you up. It's related to the main transactional database, so you check immediately.

A story about a nightmare scenario for every SRE

Story time, it's about cloud security failures and why good engineering practices matter, especially during the One to N journey. As a team lead, you're woken up by an AWS billing alarm!

Curious case of debugging failing webhook API requests

A short debugging story to start off the new year. Dev: Our backend has a webhook API that a third party will invoke over the internet. The customer team from that third party is on the call. They are getting a 500 error when making this API call.

A curious story of debugging Machine Learning model performance

You're woken up by a p90 latency-related alert. This alert is for the main API service, so you start investigating right away.

Database Reliability - Migrating Terabyte from self-hosted MySQL to GCP CloudSQL

You're a lead SRE and CTO asks you to manage and scale a self-managed 6-node MySQL cluster with 1.5+ TB data on production. You do what it takes, a few months pass, but now, it's time to move to a managed service. You think this should be straightforward, but it's not so easy.

Database Reliability - Zero Downtime Schema Migrations with MySQL

You join a team as lead SRE, and the CTO asks you to manage and scale a self-managed 6-node MySQL cluster on production.

Migrating Terabytes of metrics data with zero downtime

You're an SRE responsible for VictoriaMetrics deployment with 30 Million time series/min. The CTO wants you to drastically reduce the costs for this infra without compromising reliability.

Building Pull Request-based ephemeral Preview environments on Kubernetes

A CTO of a company calls you. They just migrated from Heroku to AWS on EKS. He's happy with the migration but wants you to build Heroku's "Ephemeral Preview Apps" on Kubernetes.

My app is slow. Can you fix it?

A founder of a recently funded company calls you. He wants you to come in and fix webapp performance problems. You have been in similar situations before and want another thrill, so you say:

Taming GCP networking cloud costs

Here's a story of a pragmatic tech lead who understands networking fundamentals like iptables, packet routing and NAT saved thousands of $$$ on cloud costs.

A case of Terabyte scale backup and recovery solution

You are a tech lead who's tasked to backup 1.5TB (yes, not a typo, a terabyte) of data DAILY to S3. You're not really sure about any other background about this requirement, so you start asking some questions:

Not all debugging stories have a happy ending

Sometimes you have to decide what problems are worth solving and only focus on those. You migrate application services running on VMs to K8s. Everything works fine, except for one service.

A curious case of slow APIs

You're a tech lead who's just joined a team and on your first day, the CTO tells you: "Our video processing API is very slow, looks like it's a problem with AWS EFS that we are using. Take a look and fix it."

Unblocking Team members

Teammate(T): Hey, I am blocked since I don't have AWS access credentials for the last 2 days. I am unable to proceed with any work. You: Well, have you raised a request to get the credentials?

Subscribe for more such content

Hold for 2 seconds to verify

Subscribe for more such content

Hold for 2 seconds to verify

Subscribe for more such content

Hold for 2 seconds to verify

Subscribe for more such content

Hold for 2 seconds to verify

Blogs.

Shooting ourselves in the foot by enabling Spring Kafka batching

We enabled Spring Kafka batch listeners to improve throughput and broke non-blocking retries. Here is how Kafka producer batching (batch.size, linger.ms) actually solved our problem and when batch listeners are the right choice.

Why your Architecture should start with Questions, not boxes

Gitops for Kafka in the real world: How we governed 78 clusters without breaking production

This post is about how we, as a lean platform engg team used gitops and jikkou to bring 78 kafka clusters under control, cut ticket based changes from days to minutes, and kept legacy kafka 0.8.2 clusters safe in production.

Prayogshala - The Engineering Laboratory at One2N

We created Prayogshala, One2N’s internal engineering lab, to capture our learnings, experiments and knowledge base. See how it helps engineers get better by asking "why" before "how".

The Gotchas of OTEL collector processors for effective observability in K8s

How Queueing Theory Makes Systems Reliable

Learn how SREs use queueing theory to explain why 70 percent utilisation feels calm, 90 percent feels cursed, and how the same math helps you choose headroom, tame retries, and protect your error budget before incidents hit.

Blogs.

Shooting ourselves in the foot by enabling Spring Kafka batching

We enabled Spring Kafka batch listeners to improve throughput and broke non-blocking retries. Here is how Kafka producer batching (batch.size, linger.ms) actually solved our problem and when batch listeners are the right choice.

Why your Architecture should start with Questions, not boxes

Gitops for Kafka in the real world: How we governed 78 clusters without breaking production

This post is about how we, as a lean platform engg team used gitops and jikkou to bring 78 kafka clusters under control, cut ticket based changes from days to minutes, and kept legacy kafka 0.8.2 clusters safe in production.

Blogs.

Shooting ourselves in the foot by enabling Spring Kafka batching

We enabled Spring Kafka batch listeners to improve throughput and broke non-blocking retries. Here is how Kafka producer batching (batch.size, linger.ms) actually solved our problem and when batch listeners are the right choice.

Why your Architecture should start with Questions, not boxes

Gitops for Kafka in the real world: How we governed 78 clusters without breaking production

This post is about how we, as a lean platform engg team used gitops and jikkou to bring 78 kafka clusters under control, cut ticket based changes from days to minutes, and kept legacy kafka 0.8.2 clusters safe in production.