DevOps

51 entries tagged “DevOps”

AI Workflow Automation: Let the Model Decide, Let Code Act August 4, 2025 · 4 min The trick to AI workflow automation is simple: let the model decide, let deterministic code act, and never confuse the two. devops ai agents

Agentic Workflows in Production: Constrain the Blast Radius April 1, 2024 · 5 min AI agents that take actions carry real blast radius. Policy allowlists, structured workflows, idempotent steps, tracing, and a shadow-mode rollout. agents ai production

Terraform Patterns That Scale: Modules, State, Promotion November 21, 2022 · 6 min Practical Terraform patterns for teams past the tutorial stage: module design, state management, environment promotion, and policy enforcement. infrastructure-as-code devops cloud

Platform Engineering: DevOps Grew Up November 7, 2022 · 4 min Platform engineering is what happens when you realize 'you build it, you run it' does not scale past a handful of teams. platform-engineering devops developer-experience

Monorepo vs. Polyrepo: A Practical Decision Guide October 31, 2022 · 4 min Monorepo or polyrepo depends on coupling, team shape, and your appetite for build tooling. Here is how to decide without getting religious about it. architecture development developer-experience

Kubernetes Requests and Limits: Lessons From an Outage September 5, 2022 · 5 min CPU is compressible and memory is not. How to set Kubernetes requests and limits from real usage, when to skip CPU limits, and which guardrails to add. kubernetes infrastructure devops

Kubernetes Security Hardening: Pods, RBAC, Network, Secrets February 7, 2022 · 7 min Kubernetes defaults favor convenience over security. A layered hardening guide covering pods, RBAC, network policies, secrets, and the control plane. kubernetes security devops

DORA Metrics: Keep Them Off Performance Reviews January 24, 2022 · 5 min DORA metrics work until someone puts them on a performance review. How to define, collect, and use them at team level without gaming. metrics devops productivity

Terraform at Scale: What Changed Since 2019 December 6, 2021 · 6 min Two years after my first Terraform-at-scale post: what held up, what broke, and what I do differently now with modules, workspaces, CI, and policy. infrastructure-as-code devops cloud

Platform Engineering Maturity: Why Teams Stall at Level 2 November 1, 2021 · 6 min Most platform teams build tools nobody asked for while developers wait in ticket queues. Lessons from platform teams at large companies. platform-engineering devops developer-experience

Feature Flags at Scale: Ownership, Expiry, and Cleanup September 6, 2021 · 5 min 847 feature flags, about 200 with owners. Lessons from production codebases on flag types, ownership rules, fail modes, and cleanup. ci-cd devops go

Observability-Driven Development: Instrument Before You Ship June 14, 2021 · 4 min Observability-driven development without the jargon: structured logs, RED metrics, traces, and SLO alerts that ship with each feature. observability development reliability

DevSecOps in Practice: The Pipeline Controls I Implement April 19, 2021 · 7 min Pre-commit hooks, CI security stages, OPA Gatekeeper policies, and a triage system: the DevSecOps controls I set up so developers don't route around them. security devops ci-cd

MLOps Fundamentals: Fix the Basics Before Buying Tools March 22, 2021 · 4 min Most teams buying MLOps tools can't version their training data. Start with dataset versioning, a release checklist, and one monitoring signal. ai devops data

Platform Engineering vs DevOps: Mostly a Rebrand October 19, 2020 · 3 min The industry loves renaming things. Platform teams and internal developer platforms are DevOps done properly, and most companies still won't do it right. platform-engineering devops infrastructure

Observability for Small Distributed Teams: A Minimal Stack September 14, 2020 · 6 min Most observability advice targets 500-engineer orgs. For a small distributed team: structured logs, a request_id, one dashboard per service, few alerts. observability distributed-systems devops

GitHub Actions in Production: Matrix, Caching, Secrets July 20, 2020 · 6 min Matrix builds, dependency caching, gated deploys, and the security gotchas I hit building a startup's CI/CD pipeline on GitHub Actions. ci-cd devops

Kubernetes Requests and Limits: How I Size Resources June 1, 2020 · 5 min 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. kubernetes devops infrastructure

Terraform Testing: Static Checks, Policy, and Integration February 17, 2020 · 6 min I tested Terraform modules with static checks, policy engines, and integration runs side by side: what each layer catches, what it misses, when to run it. infrastructure testing infrastructure-as-code

Kubernetes Predictions for 2020: Day-Two Operations Win January 6, 2020 · 4 min The adoption debate is over. 2020 is about operating Kubernetes well: managed control planes, GitOps by default, and policy enforcement. kubernetes trends cloud

Zero-Downtime Deployments: Migrations, Probes, and Habits October 21, 2019 · 5 min Zero-downtime deploys depend less on tooling than on expand-and-contract migrations, backward-compatible code, readiness probes, and graceful shutdown. ci-cd devops kubernetes

Terraform at Scale: Splitting the State Monolith September 23, 2019 · 6 min How to split a monolithic Terraform state into something teams can work with: state layout by domain, small pinned modules, plan review, and drift checks. infrastructure-as-code infrastructure devops

Developer Experience: Internal Platforms vs Ad-Hoc Tooling August 12, 2019 · 6 min Purpose-built internal platforms versus the scripts and Makefiles teams grow themselves, and the team size and pain at which each one wins. developer-experience platform-engineering devops

Security Incident Response: Drills Beat Written Plans July 15, 2019 · 7 min Most incident response plans are shelf-ware. What matters in a breach: simple severity levels, the first 30 minutes, four roles, evidence, and drills. security incident-management devops

Internal Developer Platforms: Treat Them as Products March 11, 2019 · 3 min Most internal developer platforms fail because nobody treated them as a product. Lessons from building, and scrapping, platform tooling at three startups. platform-engineering devops developer-experience

GitOps with Flux and Argo CD: Stop Deploying From a Laptop February 11, 2019 · 9 min How to move a team off ad-hoc kubectl deploys to Git-driven Kubernetes with Flux and Argo CD: repo layout, secrets, rollbacks, and my mistakes. ci-cd devops kubernetes

Kubernetes Production Checklist: The Boring Basics January 14, 2019 · 5 min Most Kubernetes outages come from skipped basics: limits, probes, network policies, RBAC, upgrades, etcd restores. The checklist I run on every cluster. kubernetes devops infrastructure

Terraform in Production: Repo Layout, Modules, and State October 29, 2018 · 4 min Opinionated Terraform patterns from a fintech startup: repo layout, small modules, per-environment state, CI plans, drift detection, and secrets. infrastructure infrastructure-as-code devops

Container Security in 2018: PSP, Distroless, Image Signing August 20, 2018 · 3 min Eight months after my first container security post: PodSecurityPolicy, distroless images, image signing, and Vault at a fintech startup. security containers kubernetes

Monitoring vs Observability: Lessons From a Silent Outage July 9, 2018 · 5 min After an outage our dashboards couldn't explain, I rebuilt a fintech startup's telemetry around metrics, logs, and traces tied together by request IDs. observability devops distributed-systems

SRE Principles for Small Teams: Skip the Cargo Cult April 30, 2018 · 4 min Teams copy Google's SRE playbook without asking if it fits. What matters for small teams: one SLO, error budgets, toil, alerts, and postmortems. reliability devops operations

Kubernetes Operators: Powerful, but Overhyped April 2, 2018 · 3 min Kubernetes operators are useful for Day 2 operations, but writing a good one is hard. When to adopt an existing operator, when to build your own. kubernetes devops infrastructure

Two Years of Kubernetes in Production: The Boring Parts January 22, 2018 · 6 min Year two of running Kubernetes in production: network policies, DNS, resource requests, PodDisruptionBudgets, upgrades, and RBAC. kubernetes containers devops

Building a Platform Team: Lessons from Our First Year December 28, 2017 · 5 min Standing up a small platform team at a fintech startup: tight scope, infrastructure run as a product, paved roads over mandates, and what I'd change. platform-engineering teams engineering

Container Security Beyond the Basics: What We Hardened December 4, 2017 · 5 min Containers share the host kernel, so they aren't a security boundary. How we hardened images, runtimes, network policies, and RBAC at a fintech startup. containers kubernetes security

Incident Management for Growing Teams: What to Change October 23, 2017 · 5 min How incident response changed as our fintech startup outgrew five people: incident roles, severity levels, sane on-call, mitigation first, real follow-up. incident-management devops reliability

Chaos Engineering for Small Teams: No Netflix Required August 21, 2017 · 4 min Chaos engineering for a small team: start with whiteboard game days, then staging experiments with kill and tc. Always a hypothesis, always a stop button. reliability testing devops

Security Automation in CI: Stop Reviewing by Hand July 17, 2017 · 4 min Manual security review can't keep up with continuous delivery. How I moved secret scanning, dependency audits, SAST, and DAST into a fintech CI pipeline. security devops ci-cd

Observability vs Monitoring: Why Dashboards Aren't Enough March 20, 2017 · 3 min Monitoring answers questions you predicted. After splitting into microservices, we needed structured logs, trace IDs, and tracing to debug what broke. observability devops distributed-systems

Kubernetes in Production: What Paid Off and What Bit Us January 16, 2017 · 6 min Running Kubernetes in production: what paid off, what bit us (networking, secrets, YAML sprawl), and who should adopt it. kubernetes containers devops

Production Monitoring: Why We Deleted 42 Grafana Panels December 12, 2016 · 3 min We cut 47 Grafana panels to five metrics and three paging alerts. The production metrics that matter for a startup backend, and how to prune the rest. observability devops production

Container Orchestration: Docker Swarm vs Kubernetes vs Mesos October 17, 2016 · 4 min Docker Swarm, Kubernetes, and Mesos compared side by side at a mobility startup in late 2016. Kubernetes will win, but its operational tax is real. containers kubernetes agents

Building a Security-First Engineering Culture October 3, 2016 · 5 min Security culture is habits leadership enforces: no secrets in code, a security question on every PR, least privilege, patch deadlines, and champions. security engineering teams

Log Aggregation at Scale: ELK vs Alternatives September 5, 2016 · 4 min ELK is powerful and a second full-time job. What running it at a mobility startup taught me, and the hosted or simpler options I'd pick instead. observability databases devops

Zero-Downtime PostgreSQL Migrations: Expand and Contract August 15, 2016 · 7 min How to change PostgreSQL schemas without maintenance windows: expand and contract, batched backfills, NOT VALID constraints, and concurrent indexes. databases devops engineering

Why I Moved Our AWS Infrastructure to Terraform June 20, 2016 · 6 min We moved from console-driven, script-heavy infrastructure to Terraform so changes are reviewed, reproducible, and recoverable from code. infrastructure-as-code devops cloud

Continuous Deployment Without the Chaos June 6, 2016 · 5 min Continuous deployment is a discipline problem. How we ship a mobility startup's backend many times a day: trusted tests, small changes, fast rollback. ci-cd devops engineering

Security Incident Response Playbook for Startups May 23, 2016 · 8 min An incident response playbook for small teams, learned the hard way: define incidents, name owners, contain carefully, and communicate clearly. security incident-management startups

Ansible vs Puppet vs Chef: Why Ansible Won for Us April 25, 2016 · 2 min Puppet, Chef, and Ansible compared from production use. Ansible wins on least ceremony; Puppet and Chef still fit large or Ruby-fluent infra teams. infrastructure-as-code devops infrastructure

Building a DevOps Culture from Scratch March 10, 2016 · 5 min Hiring a DevOps engineer won't end the dev vs ops fight. Put developers on the pager, pilot with one team, and fix incentives before tools. devops teams engineering

Docker in Production: Lessons from Running Containers February 8, 2016 · 8 min What running Docker in production at a mobility startup taught us about image builds, tagging, networking, logs, resource limits, and non-root security. containers devops infrastructure

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