Polvero https://polvero.site/ Writing about distributed systems, Kafka, Postgres, observability, and SRE. By Marco. en-us Mon, 04 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://polvero.site/assets/og-preview.png Polvero https://polvero.site/ What I Wish Someone Had Told Me About Kafka Consumer Groups https://polvero.site/blog/kafka-consumer-groups.html https://polvero.site/blog/kafka-consumer-groups.html Wed, 22 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Rebalancing, partition assignment, lag monitoring, and the subtle bugs that appear when you scale consumers. A Year of On-Call: What Actually Pages vs. What Should https://polvero.site/blog/on-call-year.html https://polvero.site/blog/on-call-year.html Wed, 11 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000 After a full year primary on-call, a honest accounting of what fired, what was noise, and what we should have been alerting on. PgBouncer in Production: Lessons from a Connection Pool That Fell Over https://polvero.site/blog/pgbouncer-production.html https://polvero.site/blog/pgbouncer-production.html Tue, 03 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000 What happens when your connection pool becomes the bottleneck instead of Postgres itself. Pool modes, sizing, and the query that killed us. Two Years With a Service Mesh: What I'd Tell Past Me https://polvero.site/blog/service-mesh-lessons.html https://polvero.site/blog/service-mesh-lessons.html Tue, 06 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Istio in production for two years. What it actually solves, what it makes harder, and the operational complexity nobody warns you about. 2025: Year in Review https://polvero.site/blog/year-2025.html https://polvero.site/blog/year-2025.html Sun, 28 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000 What I shipped, broke, learned, and am carrying into 2026. Observability Is Not Monitoring: The Distinction That Finally Made Sense https://polvero.site/blog/observability-not-monitoring.html https://polvero.site/blog/observability-not-monitoring.html Wed, 19 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 What the observability vs. monitoring distinction actually means in practice, after two years of production incidents. The Incident That Taught Me to Read Runbooks Before Incidents https://polvero.site/blog/incident-2025.html https://polvero.site/blog/incident-2025.html Wed, 08 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000 A production incident, a runbook that existed but nobody had read, and what we changed afterward.