// Topics / Devops

Devops

Definition

Devops coverage in this archive spans 49 posts from Feb 2016 to Nov 2022 and focuses on reliability, delivery speed, and cost discipline as one system, not three separate concerns. The strongest adjacent threads are infrastructure, kubernetes, and security. Recurring title motifs include kubernetes, production, platform, and scale.

Key claims

  • Most posts prioritize predictable operations over feature breadth or stack novelty.
  • Early posts lean on kubernetes and production, while newer posts lean on kubernetes and platform as constraints shifted.
  • This topic repeatedly intersects with infrastructure, kubernetes, and security, so design choices here rarely stand alone.

Practical checklist

  • Set SLOs first, then choose tooling that keeps deploy, observability, and rollback simple.
  • Start with the newest post to calibrate current constraints, then backtrack to older entries for first principles.
  • When boundary questions appear, cross-read infrastructure and kubernetes before committing implementation details.

Failure modes

  • Adding platform layers faster than the team can operate and debug them.
  • Chasing throughput gains without proving they improve end-user reliability.
  • Applying guidance from 2016 to 2022 without revisiting assumptions as context changed.

Suggested reading path

References

49 entries tagged “Devops”

    Infrastructure as Code Patterns That Actually Scale · 6 min Practical Terraform patterns for teams that have outgrown the tutorial stage: module design, state management, environment promotion, and policy enforcement. infrastructure-as-code terraform devops Platform Engineering: DevOps Grew Up · 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 · 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 monorepo git Kubernetes Requests and Limits: Lessons From Getting It Wrong · 5 min CPU is compressible. Memory is not. That one sentence explains 80% of Kubernetes resource problems. kubernetes resources capacity-planning Hardening Kubernetes: The Stuff That Actually Matters · 7 min 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. kubernetes security hardening DORA Metrics: Stop Ruining a Good Idea · 4 min DORA metrics are useful exactly until someone puts them on a performance review. Here's how to use them without destroying your engineering culture. dora metrics devops Terraform at Scale: What Changed Since 2019 · 6 min Two years ago I wrote about Terraform patterns for growing teams. Here's what held up, what broke, and what I do differently now. terraform infrastructure-as-code devops Most Platform Teams Are Building the Wrong Thing · 6 min 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. platform-engineering devops developer-experience Feature Flags at Scale: What Nobody Warns You About · 5 min 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. feature-flags deployment devops Observability-Driven Development Is Just Instrumenting Your Code · 4 min ODD sounds fancy. It's not. It means writing logs, metrics, and traces before you ship, not after your first outage. observability monitoring development DevSecOps in Practice: What I Actually Implement · 7 min The concrete pipeline configs, policy-as-code patterns, and runtime controls I set up to bake security into delivery. devsecops security devops Most Teams Are Not Ready for MLOps · 4 min MLOps is real, but most teams buying MLOps tooling cannot even version their training data. Fix the basics first. mlops machine-learning devops Platform Engineering Is Just DevOps With a Rebrand · 3 min The industry loves renaming things. Platform engineering is DevOps done properly — and most companies still won't do it right. platform-engineering devops infrastructure Observability for Small Distributed Teams (What Actually Works) · 6 min 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. observability monitoring distributed-systems The GitHub Actions Patterns I Actually Use in Production · 7 min Matrix builds, dependency caching, gated deploys, and the security gotchas I hit building Decloud's CI/CD pipeline on GitHub Actions. github-actions ci-cd devops Stop Guessing Your Kubernetes Resource Limits · 6 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 Comparing Infrastructure Testing Approaches: What Actually Catches Bugs · 6 min 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. infrastructure testing terraform My Kubernetes Predictions for 2020 (Most of Yours Are Wrong) · 4 min 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. kubernetes predictions cloud-native Zero Downtime Deploys Are a Team Habit, Not a Tool · 5 min 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. deployment devops kubernetes Your Terraform Monolith Will Break. Here's How to Fix It Before It Does. · 6 min 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. terraform infrastructure devops Internal Platforms vs. Ad-Hoc Tooling: Which Developer Experience Actually Wins · 6 min 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. developer-experience platform-engineering devops Your Incident Response Plan Is Useless Until Someone Bleeds · 7 min 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. security incident-response devops Your Internal Platform Is Probably a Liability · 3 min 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. platform devops developer-experience GitOps: Stop SSHing Into Production · 9 min 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. gitops devops kubernetes The Boring Kubernetes Checklist That Actually Keeps Production Alive · 5 min 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. kubernetes devops infrastructure IaC Patterns That Actually Work · 4 min 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. infrastructure terraform iac Container Security in 2018: What Actually Changed · 3 min 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. security containers docker Why Monitoring Wasn't Enough and How We Built Observability at a Fintech Startup · 5 min 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. observability monitoring devops SRE Principles Are Great. The Cargo-Culting Is Not. · 5 min 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. sre devops reliability Kubernetes Operators: Powerful, but Overhyped · 3 min 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. kubernetes operators devops Two Years of Kubernetes in Production — The Boring Parts Are the Hard Parts · 7 min 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. kubernetes containers devops What I Learned Building Our Platform Team This Year · 5 min 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. platform teams engineering Your Containers Aren't Secure. Here's What to Actually Do About It. · 5 min 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. containers docker kubernetes Your Incident Process Will Break at 15 People. Here's What to Do. · 5 min What I learned building incident management at the fintech startup — from five people shouting across a room to actual structured response. incident-management devops on-call You Don't Need to Be Netflix to Break Things on Purpose · 4 min 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. chaos-engineering reliability testing Stop Doing Security Reviews by Hand · 5 min 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. security devops devsecops Monitoring Is Not Enough · 3 min Your dashboards look green. Your users say the site is broken. That gap is the whole problem. observability monitoring devops A Year Running Kubernetes in Production — What Actually Happened · 6 min 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. kubernetes containers devops Why We Deleted 42 Grafana Panels · 3 min Most teams monitor too much and alert on the wrong things. Five metrics are enough to run a startup backend. monitoring observability devops Container Orchestration: Docker Swarm vs Kubernetes vs Mesos · 4 min 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. containers docker kubernetes Building a Security-First Engineering Culture · 5 min Security culture is not a training program or a tool purchase. It is a set of habits that leadership enforces through consistency, not speeches. security engineering culture Log Aggregation at Scale: ELK vs Alternatives · 4 min 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. logging elk elasticsearch Database Migrations Without Downtime · 7 min A practical guide to evolving schemas without maintenance windows by keeping old and new code compatible at every step. databases migrations postgresql Why I Moved Our Infrastructure to Terraform · 6 min We moved from console-driven, script-heavy infrastructure to Terraform so changes are reviewed, reproducible, and recoverable from code. terraform infrastructure-as-code devops Continuous Deployment Without the Chaos · 6 min 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. continuous-deployment devops ci-cd Security Incident Response for Startups · 9 min A practical incident response playbook for small teams: define incidents, assign owners, contain fast, investigate calmly, and recover with clear communication. security incident-response startups Ansible Won Because It's the Simplest · 2 min I used all three. Ansible required the least ceremony. That's the whole argument. ansible puppet chef Building a DevOps Culture from Scratch · 5 min 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. devops culture engineering Docker in Production: What We Learned Running Containers at Dropbyke · 8 min 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. docker containers devops
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