Devops

Practical Terraform patterns for teams that have outgrown the tutorial stage: module design, state management, environment promotion, and policy enforcement.

Platform engineering is what happens when you realize 'you build it, you run it' does not scale past a handful of teams.

Monorepo or polyrepo depends on coupling, team shape, and your appetite for build tooling. Here is how to decide without getting religious about it.

CPU is compressible. Memory is not. That one sentence explains 80% of Kubernetes resource problems.

Kubernetes defaults are built for getting things running, not for keeping attackers out. A layered hardening walkthrough covering pods, RBAC, network policies, secrets, and the control plane.

DORA metrics are useful exactly until someone puts them on a performance review. Here's how to use them without destroying your engineering culture.

Two years ago I wrote about Terraform patterns for growing teams. Here's what held up, what broke, and what I do differently now.

After assessing platform maturity at a dozen enterprises, the pattern is clear: most platform teams build tools nobody asked for while developers wait in ticket queues.

Feature flags are great until you have 847 of them and nobody knows which ones are safe to remove. Practical lessons from Decloud and enterprise teams.

ODD sounds fancy. It's not. It means writing logs, metrics, and traces before you ship, not after your first outage.

The concrete pipeline configs, policy-as-code patterns, and runtime controls I set up to bake security into delivery.

MLOps is real, but most teams buying MLOps tooling cannot even version their training data. Fix the basics first.

The industry loves renaming things. Platform engineering is DevOps done properly — and most companies still won't do it right.

Most observability advice is written for 500-engineer orgs. Here's what actually matters when you're a small distributed team trying not to drown in dashboards.

Matrix builds, dependency caching, gated deploys, and the security gotchas I hit building Decloud's CI/CD pipeline on GitHub Actions.

Most K8s clusters I audit are either wildly overprovisioned or one bad deploy away from eviction storms. Here's how I set requests, limits, and guardrails.

I tested Terraform modules with unit checks, policy engines, and full integration runs side by side. Here's what each approach actually catches and what it misses.

The adoption debate is over. 2020 is about operating Kubernetes well -- managed control planes, GitOps by default, policy enforcement, and being honest about what's overhyped.

Every team says they want zero downtime. Few want to do the boring work that actually gets them there. Here's what that boring work looks like.

Lessons from splitting a 4000-resource Terraform state into something teams can actually work with -- state layout, module boundaries, and the workflow discipline nobody wants to do until they have to.

A comparison of two approaches to developer experience -- purpose-built internal platforms versus the organic tooling that teams build for themselves -- and when each one actually delivers.

Most incident response plans are shelf-ware. Here's what actually matters when your infrastructure is on fire -- drawn from real breaches, NATO cyber exercises, and startup chaos.

Most internal developer platforms fail not because they're technically bad, but because nobody treated them like a product. Thoughts from building (and scrapping) platform tooling across three startups.

How I moved three teams off ad-hoc kubectl deployments and onto Git-driven infrastructure -- with code examples, repo layouts, and the mistakes I made along the way.

Most Kubernetes outages come from skipping the basics. Here's the checklist I use after running clusters at the fintech startup and now at Decloud.

Opinionated Infrastructure as Code patterns from running Terraform at the fintech startup. Repo layout, modules, state management, and the stuff that burns you if you ignore it.

Eight months after my first container security post, an update on what moved at the fintech startup and in the ecosystem — PodSecurityPolicy, image signing, and the shift from scratch to real.

After a mystery outage that our dashboards couldn't explain, I rebuilt the fintech startup's telemetry stack around metrics, logs, and traces. Here's what I learned.

The SRE hype train has everyone copying Google's playbook without asking whether it fits. Here's what actually matters when you're not running planet-scale infrastructure.

Operators are the hot thing in the Kubernetes world right now. They're genuinely useful — but the hype is outpacing the reality for most teams.

Year two of running Kubernetes at the fintech startup. The panic is gone. Now it's networking, resource tuning, and all the operational grunt work nobody blogs about.

Reflections on standing up the fintech startup's platform team in 2017 — what worked, what didn't, and why treating infra like a product changed everything.

Containers give you process isolation, not a security boundary. I break down how we hardened images, locked down runtimes, and segmented networks at the fintech startup — plus the stuff nobody warns you about.

What I learned building incident management at the fintech startup — from five people shouting across a room to actual structured response.

Chaos engineering isn't just for the big players. Here's how a small team can start breaking things deliberately and actually learn from it.

Your manual security gate is a bottleneck pretending to be a process. Here's how I moved security checks into the pipeline at the fintech startup so we could ship fast without shipping stupid.

Your dashboards look green. Your users say the site is broken. That gap is the whole problem.

After a year of running Kubernetes in production, the wins are real but the sharp edges drew blood first. Here's what paid off, what bit us, and what I'd do differently.

Most teams monitor too much and alert on the wrong things. Five metrics are enough to run a startup backend.

A side-by-side comparison of Swarm, Kubernetes, and Mesos based on running all three in evaluation at Dropbyke. Kubernetes is going to win, but the operational tax is real.

Security culture is not a training program or a tool purchase. It is a set of habits that leadership enforces through consistency, not speeches.

ELK is powerful. It's also a second full-time job. Here's what I learned running it at Dropbyke, and what I'd consider instead.

A practical guide to evolving schemas without maintenance windows by keeping old and new code compatible at every step.

We moved from console-driven, script-heavy infrastructure to Terraform so changes are reviewed, reproducible, and recoverable from code.

Continuous deployment is not a tooling problem. It is a discipline problem. We deploy the Dropbyke backend dozens of times a day because we built habits first and automation second.

A practical incident response playbook for small teams: define incidents, assign owners, contain fast, investigate calmly, and recover with clear communication.

I used all three. Ansible required the least ceremony. That's the whole argument.

DevOps is a cultural shift, not a job title. This post lays out a practical, 2016-era path to shared responsibility, fast feedback, and resilient delivery without hand-wavy promises.

Running Docker in production at Dropbyke forced us to get serious about image builds, container networking, log aggregation, and security. Here is what actually worked.