Database & storage reliability
MySQL, RocksDB and storage at scale — replication, capacity, query performance, and the failure modes that only show up when the data gets big.
Site reliability · NSW South Coast
Ship fast.
Stay level.
Positive Rate Engineering is a senior, one-person reliability practice for the systems you can't afford to have fail — databases, storage, observability, and the pipelines that keep your team shipping.
What I do
Four things, done properly
Observability
Instrumenting systems so you can see trouble coming: metrics that mean something, alerts that fire for real problems, and dashboards you'd actually open at 3am.
Deployment pipelines
CI/CD that lets your team ship fast and often, with enough automated confidence that a bad change gets caught before your customers find it.
Incidents & failure analysis
Working out exactly why something broke, then making sure it can't break the same way twice. Blameless, thorough, and written down.
How I work
Run the checklist
Aviation solved this problem decades ago: when the stakes are high and the pressure is on, you don't improvise. You work the list. The same discipline is what keeps production systems flying straight.
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Read the instruments first. Before changing anything, I find out what the system is actually doing.
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Redundancy before you need it. The time to build the second path is well before the first one fails.
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Small changes, often. Frequent, boring deploys are safer than rare, heroic ones.
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Understand every failure. An outage you didn't explain is an outage you'll have again.
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Leave it documented. Your team should be able to run it without me. That's the point.
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About
You get the engineer, not a pipeline of juniors
I'm Sam Dunster. I've spent my career on backend systems at scale — databases, storage and the infrastructure underneath them — including time as a production engineer at a global social media company, where I carried the pager for systems a very long way from small.
Positive Rate Engineering is deliberately just me. When you hire this practice you get a senior engineer working directly on your problem, from scoping through to the write-up. No account managers, no handover to someone more junior once the contract is signed.
I'm based on the NSW South Coast and work with teams wherever their infrastructure lives.
Get in touch
Start a conversation
Tell me what's breaking, what's slow, or what you're about to build. I'll tell you honestly whether I'm the right person for it.