At ACRL, we get to talk to a lot of clusters… I mean people.

6.29K Posts, 184 Following, 302 Followers · Optimizer. Photographer. In disbelief that computers actually work. Accidentally writing a role-playing game. (he/him)

Earlier this year, I had the opportunity to chat with Courtney Nash at SREcon, and one of the things she reminded me is that “it’s OK to say that you’re an expert”.

Editor’s note: I’ve been informed that the introduction to this post is convoluted and confusing.

Hi friends!

OK, this story starts off with a colleague messaging me at 9am on a Tuesday morning: “Hey, drmorr, Karpenter is behaving a little bit strangely in this cluster, could you take a quick look?”

Discrete event simulator for Kubernetes spark jobs - acrlabs/sk-spark

On the pain scale, a root canal might be an eight.

If you’re detail-oriented, skeptical, or just enjoy watching Pod transitions in your spare time, you may have noticed a peculiar behavior in SimKube: Pods transition to Running very quickly.

This is a bonus post for the week, because I’m frustrated and mad.

Happy June, everybody!

It is kind of wild to me that ACRL was founded 3 years ago; in June of 2023 I stepped out on this crazy adventure and I had no idea where it was going to go or how long it would last, but here we are,...

I’ve been doing some work with SimKube for a client recently and have run into a bunch of issues with SimKube fixed regarding its handling of bare Kubernetes pods.

I’ve been doing some work with SimKube for a client recently and have run into a bunch of issues with SimKube fixed regarding its handling of bare Kubernetes pods.

Ok, so, suppose you’ve written a Kubernetes controller, you did it in Rust, and then you realized that “Hey, when this thing breaks it’s hard to understand what’s going on”. So, you decide to emit som...

Last month I had the pleasure of going to SRECon 2026 Americas in Seattle; I realized that I posted the transcript of my talk but I didn’t actually do a recap of the conference itself, so I’m going to...

We just released SimKube 2.5.0, which as I said on Mastodon, feels like a big milestone for mainly “I like round numbers” reasons; but I think this is actually a pretty major release, as it’s the firs...

YouTube video by USENIX

We just released SimKube 2.5.0, which as I said on Mastodon, feels like a big milestone for mainly “I like round numbers” reasons; but I think this is actually a pretty major release, as it’s the firs...

We’re pleased to announce that two AMIs (Amazon Machine Images) have joined the SimKube family!

KubeCon + CloudNativeCon gathers adopters and technologists from leading open source and cloud native communities from November 9-12. Join our current graduated, incubating, and sandbox projects as…

SRECon 2026 Talk Transcript

SRECon 2026 Talk Transcript

5.58K Posts, 169 Following, 295 Followers · Optimizer. Photographer. In disbelief that computers actually work. Accidentally writing a role-playing game. (he/him)

5.58K Posts, 169 Following, 295 Followers · Optimizer. Photographer. In disbelief that computers actually work. Accidentally writing a role-playing game. (he/him)

OK, as promised last week, this post is a follow-on to my previous write-up about running a single-node Kubernetes cluster at ACRL.

Well I was going to use this post to provide a follow-up to the hot garbage from a few weeks ago, wherein I complain about my efforts to stand up an internal ACRL Kubernetes cluster and run something ...

Alright, it’s been a long time since I’ve posted a good rant on here, so buckle up buttercup.

Hi friends!

Open-source research and development in distributed systems. Click to read Applied Computing Research Labs, by drmorr, a Substack publication.

On Wednesday, November 26, 2025, while testing changes to ACRL’s SimKube CI Runner, an ACRL employee discovered an intermittent failure in the runner.

KubeCon was last week!