Todd's Builder Blog

Beating the “Gate Rush”
Why Slow Start Matters for Resiliency and Operational Excellence

Tue, 10 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

When a new pod comes online, it often experiences a gate rush: it’s declared “Ready,” immediately receives its full share of production traffic, and then falls over—spiking latency, throwing transient 5xx/504s, or flapping readiness. This is especially common for warm-up–sensitive services (JVM class loading/JIT, cache population, connection pool establishment, TLS handshakes, model loading, etc.).

About

Wed, 04 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

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Todd is a Principal Engineer at Intuit, is building an AI-native platform with “Done For You” experiences utilizing secure, multi-tenant Kubernetes infrastructure. Todd has worked on various large-scale distributed systems projects during his career, ranging from hierarchical storage management, peer-to-peer database replication, enterprise storage virtualization, two-factor authentication SaaS, and Kubernetes clusters. Todd is co-author of the book “GitOps and Kubernetes” and is co-chair of the CNCF Developer Experience/End-user SIG.

Welcome to Groundhog Day
Why Your Meetings Keep Repeating Themselves

Mon, 02 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Ever walk into a meeting and feel an eerie sense of déjà vu?

The same slide deck. The same “quick recap.” The same debate you’re positive you already settled last week.

How can you stop meetings from repeating themselves?

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Regarding the Multi-Modal http2 support ask from Traffic, can we vend two ports (http-service-mesh and http2-service-mesh) and then document the dev teams should just use the correct one depending on the protocol being used? For different paved roads (agentic streaming, etc) the default vended template code can use the appropriate port depending on the use case. That way we don’t need to make this another configuration in AIR that the user needs to do.

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