Talks
2025-09-11 DevOpsDays Vilnius
The Filesystem Diaries: Scaling Btrfs in an Enterprise
Btrfs was merged into the Linux kernel in 2009, arriving with bold promises—and, let’s be honest, a reputation for instability. I first tried it on my laptop in 2011. It wiped my data. Twice. On the bright side, it taught me the value of backups.
Fast forward to 2025: btrfs is no longer the experimental filesystem of the past. It’s stable, mature, feature-rich, and fully part of the Linux kernel. But old reputations die hard. Even today, Google Cloud Platform doesn’t officially support it—not because of technical shortcomings, but because customer demand hasn’t pushed the issue.
At Chronosphere, we decided to take a fresh look. After months of evaluation and testing, we migrated petabytes of customer data across thousands of disks to btrfs. This talk is our story: why we made the leap, what we learned along the way, and how we’re helping bring btrfs into wider enterprise adoption—including working with Google to support it natively.
I’ll share the decision-making process, key performance and reliability insights, and the quirks you only discover when running btrfs at scale. Whether you’re btrfs-curious or just love a good ops tale, you’ll walk away with real-world takeaways—and maybe a newfound respect for this once-maligned filesystem.
If you know what NTFS, ext4, or ZFS are, you’re ready for this journey.
No video, no slides.
2022-04-10 Zig Milan Party
Maps and Yellow Pages
If you look back 10-15 years, we used “free maps” only as a last-resort way to find a tourism information office or shop that sells real maps. It also used to be funny and, in a way, interesting, to navigate “map-flavored yellow pages”. We knew we are looking at an ad brochure and acted accordingly.
These days map-flavored Yellow Pages are embedded into every smartphone, which we use daily to navigate. I find it quite sad, because constantly projecting the world through such “maps” results in a very peculiar world understanding. For those who haven’t tried, it is an interesting exercise to use Yellow Pages to find playgrounds (when traveling with kids) or water fountains during hot days.
Even in this era, not all is lost! Technology of real maps is moving and improving. I will remind you what a real map looks like and show how usable it is today. During the talk a licensed cartographer will give practical day-to-day tips for navigation and exploration. In the second half of the talk we will switch out our consumer hat to a creator hat and behold, create! No background in cartography required, only a smartphone.
2022-04-10 Zig Milan Party
How Zig is Used at Uber
- Written form.
- Slides.
- Video: webm, mkv, youtube.