Mark Cotner on Scaling Telecom

About this episode

Mark Cotner discusses scaling telecom infrastructure and the development of an embedded observability suite for Elixir built on Rust.

Mark Cotner is a DBA managing around a thousand databases by day and a telecom CTO by night — building hospitality cable networks for RV parks, nursing homes, and apartment complexes at 100% annual growth. In this episode, he walks through the infrastructure, the business, and the two-year project that just landed on Hex: Timeless, an embedded observability suite for Elixir built on Rust NIFs, hitting 3 million metric inserts per second with 14:1 compression. We get into what a hospitality network actually looks like — branded cable hardware, DOCSIS provisioning, and mesh Wi-Fi across dispersed sites — and how Mark's team handles monitoring across thousands of cable modems using a full Elixir stack (DHCP, TFTP, NTP, and Ash). He also shares how a frustrating Ansible setup led him to build something he thought should exist: a lightweight, embeddable observability backend that drops into a Phoenix app in under five minutes via Igniter, with less than 5% CPU overhead. The technical core of the conversation covers the Timeless architecture in depth — PCO compression for metrics, OpenZL for logs and traces, 15 rounds of iteration before landing on a single consolidated Rust NIF, and…

People in this episode

Host: Jacob Luetzow

Guest: Mark Cotner

Topics covered

• telecom
• database management
• observability
• network infrastructure
• Elixir
• Rust
• hospitality networks

Keywords

• telecom
• databases
• observability
• Elixir
• Rust
• hospitality networks
• Ansible
• Phoenix
• metrics
• network monitoring

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Hex, Elixir, Rust, Ansible, Phoenix, Victoria Metrics, Rocket, Bandit

Places: AWS

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