Shell scripts that outlive you
Six lines at the top of a bash script are the difference between a tool and a trap.
#devops
12 pieces tagged devops,
from February 4, 2025 to August 22, 2026.
Vendor lock-in: an honest cost model
Portability is not free and neither is dependence. A framework for deciding how much abstraction to buy.
Why your container image is 1.4 gigabytes
It should be forty megabytes. Here is where the rest of it came from and how to get it back.
Migrations that don't wake anyone up
Data migrations at scale, done in a way that is reversible at every step and boring in the middle.
You still do not need Kubernetes
It's excellent software solving a real problem that most teams do not have. The honest threshold, and what to do below it.
Infrastructure as code, ten years of lessons
State files, drift, modules that became frameworks, and the one practice that separates teams that like their IaC from teams that don't.
The state of self-hosting
Running your own infrastructure got dramatically easier while the industry was arguing about the cloud. A practical assessment.
Feature flags and the state space nobody tests
Twenty flags is a million configurations. You are testing one of them. Here's how to keep that from being a problem.
re:Invent and the year of the boring cloud announcement
Silicon, agents, and a keynote that mostly described things that already existed. That's a healthy sign.
us-east-1 goes down and takes a large chunk of the internet with it
A DNS race condition in DynamoDB's automation cascades across dozens of AWS services. The lesson is about coupling, not DNS.
In defense of the boring deploy
Blue-green, canaries, feature flags, and the deeply unfashionable practice of shipping the same way every time.
Your CI is the slowest developer on the team
A twenty-minute pipeline doesn't cost twenty minutes. It costs the context switch, the batching, and the review you skipped.