Abhishek Sah
Infrastructure engineer · Bangalore
I build and operate the software layer everything else runs on: cloud infrastructure, Kubernetes, CI/CD, observability, and the internal tooling that keeps other teams shipping.
Right now I'm at Pixxel, where I work across our EKS clusters, AWS access, reliability and observability, and our enterprise identity and billing infrastructure. Before that I was an SRE at Instabase, and earlier I spent close to three years at Gojek on the data engineering team, working where backend and infrastructure meet. That's the work that slowly pulled me towards SRE.
Some of my backend work is open source. These days I'm contributing to Frontier, Raystack's open-source identity and billing platform, where I work on fixing critical correctness and security issues. Earlier I built and open-sourced Siren, an alert-management service used across teams at Gojek.
I write here about things I run into at work, usually a production issue or some part of the stack I had to properly understand before I could fix it.
Featured
Executable Onboarding: From Docs to Agents
Replacing a long README with a small agent that spins up a complex service locally and drives its tests — onboarding as executable code.
Concurrency Controls in Golang
From simple data pipelines to token buckets — practical patterns for controlling concurrency in Go.
Managing Infrastructure at Scale With Terraform
Patterns for managing large-scale infrastructure with Terraform — modules, state, and the workflows that keep it sane.
Terraform on CI - Part 2
Setting up a Terraform pipeline on CI — the practical challenges and how to solve them. Part 2 of the series.
Writing
2026
Executable Onboarding: From Docs to AgentsReplacing a long README with a small agent that spins up a complex service locally and drives its tests — onboarding as executable code.Managing Infrastructure at Scale With TerraformPatterns for managing large-scale infrastructure with Terraform — modules, state, and the workflows that keep it sane.Go Contexts: What I Learned by Getting Things WrongThe subtle parts of Go's context package — cancellation, deadlines and propagation — learned by debugging things that broke in production.Concurrency Controls in GolangFrom simple data pipelines to token buckets — practical patterns for controlling concurrency in Go.2023
Deploying OTEL Collector as DaemonsetRunning the OpenTelemetry Collector as a Kubernetes DaemonSet at Pixxel to discover targets, scrape metrics and export telemetry.cAdvisor high cardinalityHow cAdvisor metrics blow up Prometheus cardinality in Kubernetes — and how to find and cut the expensive labels.Handling shutdowns, gracefullyHow Unix signals work and how to handle them for graceful shutdowns in long-running services.Architecting with AWS VPCA hands-on tour of designing networks on AWS — subnets, route tables, gateways and the decisions behind a production-grade VPC.Siren - Alert management at scaleBuilding Siren, an alert orchestration platform at Gojek — managing alerting rules and notifications at scale.Google IAP auth automation for CLI appsAutomating Google IAP authentication for CLI tools — a real automation project from Gojek, finally written up.2022
Docker Containers Read Only MountRunning containers with read-only filesystems and managing state safely with external mounts.Reducing Docker Images sizeWhy image size matters at fleet scale, and concrete techniques to shrink Docker images for faster, cheaper deploys.Troubleshooting Docker build failurePractical techniques for debugging Docker build failures, including using intermediate containers to inspect failing steps.Golang WaitGroupA deep dive into Go's sync.WaitGroup: how it works under the hood and how to use it without shooting yourself in the foot.2020
What makes Kafka awesome?What makes Kafka the backbone of data-driven companies — the design decisions behind its high-throughput, low-latency streaming.No Silver Bullets indeed!Revisiting Fred Brooks' classic 'No Silver Bullet' — essence vs accident in software engineering, decades later.Books I read in 2019A roundup of the books that shaped my thinking in 2019, with notes on what I took from each.2019
Object.assign() in JavaScriptHow Object.assign() copies enumerable properties between objects in JavaScript, with the gotchas to watch for.Core value of core engineeringThe core engineering principles taught in Gojek's bootcamp, and why they hold up in real production work.Blockchain is revolutionary!Why decentralization matters — the problem with central ownership and what blockchain actually changes.REST vs HTTPUntangling REST from HTTP — what the REST constraints actually are and how they differ from the protocol underneath.Learnings in Gojek BootcampWhat I learned in the first week of Gojek's engineering bootcamp.Refactoring by Martin FowlerKey lessons from Martin Fowler's Refactoring — improving code's internal structure without changing its behavior.TDD by Kent BeckNotes from Kent Beck's Test-Driven Development — using tests to manage fear and drive design.Clean codeNotes and takeaways from Robert Martin's Clean Code — the habits that separate professional code from the rest.Pragmatic ProgrammerNotes from The Pragmatic Programmer — the tips that actually made me a more effective engineer.Freya - The fondness for lambda architectureBuilding a product that ingests and processes huge volumes of data online — and why we reached for lambda architecture.