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Publications

Insights, war stories, and technical deep-dives from the NationTech team.

Latest Posts

Jean-Gabriel Gill-Couture·LinkedIn

TIL: publishNotReadyAddresses — the last hurdle to get our NATS SuperCluster online across 3 OKD sites

A classic chicken-and-egg clustering problem: Jetstream requires quorum across 3 sites before it becomes healthy, but Kubernetes won't route traffic to unhealthy pods. The fix was a single Kubernetes Service flag that opens traffic to pods before they're ready.

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Jean-Gabriel Gill-Couture·LinkedIn

Why hyperscalers are thinking inside the box — and we achieve a PUE of 0.1

Andrew Ng is right about hyperscalers achieving PUE of 1.1–1.2. But we deploy compute within existing buildings as heating appliances, achieving PUE of 0.1. The energy used to heat a home equals the compute needed to host all household workloads.

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Jean-Gabriel Gill-Couture·LinkedIn

Nobody supported RTX 5090 on OKD 4.20? We did it — and contributed back to NVIDIA

When a client needed GPU support on OKD 4.20 (CentOS Stream CoreOS 10), the official NVIDIA operator had open tickets and no support for our versions. We rolled up our sleeves, made it work, and contributed two open-source fixes — including one directly to NVIDIA.

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Sylvain Tremblay·LinkedIn

How a 'Healthy' Router pod silently broke 33% of production traffic

All Router pods reported Healthy, but 33% of requests returned 502. A NotReady node meant one router stopped receiving config updates — yet external HAProxy kept sending it traffic. The fix: a custom Rust DaemonSet watchdog that validates the Control Plane ↔ Data Plane link.

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Sylvain Tremblay·LinkedIn · 144 reactions · 97 comments · 20k+ impressions

The x86-64-v3 wall: virtualization won't save your old hardware

Tried deploying OKD 4.21 on HP Gen8 servers with Ivy Bridge CPUs. SCOS10 (RHEL 10 baseline) mandates AVX2 and FMA — which Ivy Bridge simply doesn't have. KVM is a hardware accelerator, not an emulator. If your CPU predates Haswell (2013), you've hit the v3 wall.

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Sylvain Tremblay·LinkedIn

When every test costs money, you test less — a cloud billing story

A client had idle physical machines and a recurring feeling his cloud bill didn't match the value received. We built him dual-firewall, fully HA private infrastructure on second-hand hardware using OPNSense, OKD, and Ceph. Result: variable billing dropped to zero, and his team now deploys entire stacks in three clicks.

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Sylvain Tremblay·LinkedIn Article

Aventure matinale dans le bare metal — remplacer un serveur dans un MCD sans interruption de service

Des serveurs chauffent ma maison. Voici comment j'ai remplacé un serveur défectueux d'un cluster Kubernetes (OKD) hébergeant un cluster CEPH de 248 TiB — en ~2h, sans aucune interruption de service. Un récit détaillé des étapes physiques et logicielles.

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Main Projects

Harmony

Open-source Rust infrastructure orchestrator. Deploy a complete, highly available private cloud in lines of code. Proven in production across multiple sites.

Explore Harmony →

Micro Data Centers

Harmony-powered compute clusters that heat buildings instead of wasting energy. Running in production for 5+ years in Québec.

Learn about our MCDs →