02 / 2025
Keel
A small convention for deploying services that should stay boring in production.
- Year
- 2025
- Role
- Engineering
- Stack
- Go · Nix · PostgreSQL
- Link
- Private
Keel is a personal study in keeping deployment paths short. The idea is a single, readable route from commit to running service: one artefact, one configuration shape, and a health model that can be explained on one page.
The problem
Most of the operational pain I have seen does not come from the application. It comes from the space around it — three ways to ship, two ways to configure, and a status page that cannot say what is actually true.
Keel treats that space as the product. The application can be ordinary. The path that carries it should not be.
What it insists on
- One artefact per service, built the same way every time.
- Configuration that is checked in, not assembled at the last minute.
- A status surface that answers where the service is, what it last did, and whether it is safe to touch.
The project is less a platform than a set of defaults. If a new service cannot fit the defaults, the question is whether the service is special or the defaults are wrong.