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📰 News

Stop Enabling Every AWS Security Service

A sensible general approach to cloud security: step one is to assess your actual risk, rather than just turning everything on. Worth a read if you’re trying to bring some rationality to your AWS security posture.

A One-Line Kubernetes Fix That Saved 600 Hours a Year

Kubernetes default settings are fairly sensible when you’re starting out, but this article is a good reminder that it’s worth reviewing them as your usage matures and grows.

AWS Data Centre Incident in UAE Triggers Disaster Recovery

The usual “wait for AWS to fix it” approach didn’t hold up when an object struck data centres in the UAE. Good old disaster recovery playbooks had to be dusted off, a timely reminder that cloud resilience still requires your own planning.

TeamPCP Trivy Supply Chain Attack

Trivy, the widely used dependency vulnerability scanner, suffered yet another supply chain attack compromising its users. This article is a solid breakdown of what happened. Frankly, GitHub Actions and CI/CD tooling in general are in a poor security state right now, it feels like the market is ripe for disruption.

Cloud Native Agentic Standards

Practical CNCF guidance on building cloud native agentic systems. If you’re starting to bring AI agents into your platform work, this is a useful reference for thinking about it in a principled way.

GitHub Copilot Data Privacy: Opt Out Before April 24th

GitHub is going to start using your Copilot interactions code snippets, chat conversations, acceptance decisions to train its AI models from April 24th. This article walks through the details and the steps to opt out if you’d rather keep your code private.

📚 Learning

Making etcd Incidents Easier to Debug in Production Kubernetes

A useful guide using etcd-diagnosis to speed up the resolution of etcd incidents. If you run production Kubernetes clusters, having this in your back pocket is worthwhile.

Securing Production Debugging in Kubernetes

Production debugging is always a security risk — you want to move fast in a sensitive environment. This is a solid guide on how to lock things down on Kubernetes without sacrificing your ability to diagnose problems.

Understanding Kubernetes Metrics: Best Practices for Effective Monitoring

A practical guide to the baseline metrics you can get out of the box with Kubernetes. Good grounding material for anyone building out observability for their clusters.

🧪 Interesting Projects

terravision

Generate slick-looking architecture diagrams directly from your Terraform. A handy tool for making infrastructure legible to the wider team.

CISO Assistant Community

An open-source cybersecurity management tool that supports an impressive range of compliance frameworks. Worth exploring if you’re trying to get serious about GRC without a huge budget.

layerleak

A Docker secret scanner that checks across all image layers — not just the top-level ones. Given the number of supply chain incidents lately, this kind of tool deserves a place in your pipeline.

betterleaks

A leak scanner produced by Aikido Security. Another useful addition to the security toolbox as the pressure on secret’s management continues to grow.

floci

Localstack sunset their community edition this month, and floci looks to be the emerging open-source alternative for emulating AWS locally. One to watch if you rely on local AWS emulation in your development workflow.

📅 Events

DX Annual 2026

San Francisco - 16th April 2026

DX is hosting a conference focused on platform engineering leaders and developer experience. A more intimate and practitioner-focused event worth keeping an eye on.

DevOpsCon Amsterdam 2026

Amsterdam - 20th–24th April 2026

A well-regarded conference covering DevOps, Kubernetes, CI/CD, and platform engineering. It also includes a dedicated Platform Engineering Summit track, which is worth picking out if you’re attending.

KubeCon + CloudNativeCon India 2026

India - 18th–19th June 2026

A growing edition of the KubeCon family reflecting the expanding cloud native community in the region.

DevOpsCon Berlin 2026

Berlin - 15th–19th June 2026 (also online)

A comprehensive programme covering CI/CD, Kubernetes, platform engineering, and DevSecOps. One of the more substantial European events for the DevOps and platform engineering community.

PlatformCon 2026

Online + London (23rd June) + New York (25th June) - 22nd–26th June 2026

The world’s largest platform engineering conference, with 150+ talks, 30+ hours of workshops, and in-person live days in both London and New York. I’m happy to share that I’ve had a talk accepted this year, so I’ll be speaking at PlatformCon 2026, more details to follow. An excellent signal for where platform engineering thinking is heading, and the London live day is particularly worth considering if you’re UK-based.

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📰 News

GitHub Actions Is Slowly Killing Your Engineering Team

GitHub Actions at any real scale are really poor. It seems designed for a dead-simple project with basic CI needs but falls apart with anything more complex.

Heroku Is Finally Dead

I have fond memories of using Heroku for pet projects, but ultimately it wasn’t something many of my peers brought into their professional environments.

Firebase Misconfiguration Exposes 300M Messages From Chat & Ask AI Users

A reminder that misconfiguration at scale can expose enormous volumes of user data, especially in fast-moving AI products.

Open-source game engine Godot is drowning in ‘AI slop’ code contributions

Open source projects are continuing to pay the AI contribution tax and things are starting to creak at the seams.

📚 Learning

Improve Cost Visibility and Observability With AWS Cost Categories

A deeper look at hierarchical cost categories and programmatic implementation for better financial visibility in AWS.

The FOCUS Problem Nobody Talks About

If your company is starting to get serious about FinOps practices, the FOCUS open standard is worth looking into.

Go 1.26 Interactive Tour

I love this interactive Go tour, nothing beats running the code yourself and seeing what’s changed.

Scaling Nodes From Zero: The Bottleneck

Scaling Kubernetes nodes from zero to save money, with a good discussion of the startup latency trade-offs involved.

🧪 Interesting Projects

kinc

A nice, contained way to experiment with Kubernetes inside a single Podman container.

IDE Shepherd (Datadog Extension)

A much-needed extension by Datadog to provide real-time security monitoring directly inside your IDE.

klaw.sh

Kubectl, but for AI agents.

Dockge

A web-based tool for managing your Docker Compose files.

📅 Events

KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2026

Amsterdam — 23rd–26th March 2026
The big one. Expect heavy focus on platform engineering, internal developer platforms, security, and multi-cluster operations.

Platform Engineering Day Europe 2026

Amsterdam — 23rd March 2026
I’ll be speaking at Platform Engineering Day. If you’re attending KubeCon, come along. I’ll also be at the Syntasso booth, so come say hi!

DX Annual 2026

San Francisco — 16th April 2026
DX is hosting a conference focused on Platform Engineering leaders and developer experience.

PlatformCon 2026

Online — 22nd–26th June 2026
A good signal for where platform engineering thinking is heading without the travel overhead.

SREcon Americas 2026

Santa Clara — 24th-26th March 2026
Often adjacent to platform conversations, particularly around reliability engineering and operational maturity.

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📰 News

Traditional Code Review Is Dead. What Comes Next?

I’m starting to see the cracks in traditional code review myself, particularly with the rise of AI-driven accounts opening thousands of PRs across hundreds of repos. It’s creating real review fatigue and contributing to open source burnout.

Caught in the Middle: The New Role of Platform Teams

Platform engineering is growing beyond its “making things faster” phase and taking on more responsibility across security, compliance, and FinOps. This is why platforms need to support contributions from multiple teams, with platform engineers acting as stewards rather than owning everything directly.

AWS European Sovereign Cloud

More a case of when than if. AWS has finally launched a Sovereign Cloud offering in Europe. The open question is whether it is legally siloed enough to avoid being affected by US policy.

Are your CI/CD pipelines accidentally increasing technical debt?

CI/CD configuration has always felt like a fragmented mess that is guaranteed to drift and cause constant headaches. It’s why tools like Dagger are doing so well: this complexity needs to be contained in real code, not YAML.

Developers are gaming their GitHub profiles

This feels like the flip side of the same problem showing up in code review. Beyond padding commit graphs, I’m seeing AI-driven accounts submitting thousands of low-value PRs across hundreds of repos, seemingly to manufacture reputation as quickly as possible.

Thousands of sensitive secrets published on JSONFormatter and CodeBeautify

Another reminder to always avoid web-based tools for handling sensitive data when the same tasks can easily be done using offline tools or the CLI.

🦮 Learning

Organizing and tracking costs using AWS cost allocation tags

The best time to add cost allocation tags is when you first open your AWS account. The second best time is now.

A Brief Deep-Dive into Attacking and Defending Kubernetes

A really interesting read on how to think about Kubernetes security, particularly from the attacker’s perspective. Worth reading if you work with Kubernetes, just to better understand how to reason about cluster security.

Build Centralized Alerting across your organization with CloudWatch, EventBridge, Lambda, and CDK

A nice, lightweight end-to-end example of how to approach observability in AWS.

Mastering Docker on Windows

Not sponsored, just a book I was asked to recommend.

📁 Interesting Projects

aws-doctor

A tool to help you understand where the money is going and whether you’re spending efficiently.

Tailsnitch

A security auditor for Tailscale configurations.

📅 Events

DX Annual 2026

San Francisco — 16th April 2026
DX is hosting a new conference for Platform Engineering leaders.

KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2026

Paris — 23rd - 26th March 2026
The big one. Expect heavy focus on platform engineering, internal developer platforms, security, and multi-cluster operations.

PlatformCon Online

Online — 22nd - 26th June 2026
A good signal for where platform engineering thinking is heading without the travel overhead.

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📰 News

• GitHub Actions self-hosted runners cost increases — GitHub attempted to introduce $0.002 per minute charge for self-hosted runners executing jobs on private GitHub repositories, but due to a major backlash has rolled it back.

• Zombie Workflows: A GitHub Actions horror story — Zombie GitHub Actions kept running long after repos were deleted — exposing secrets, executing unchecked code, and creating a hidden security nightmare.

• Building the Largest Known Kubernetes cluster with 130,000 nodes — Probably not necessary for most of us mere mortals, but an interesting read nonetheless.

• What’s wrong with Kubernetes today — Thoughtful piece on why Kubernetes is great at portability and reliability, but not so great at efficiency, particularly in resource usage and operational overhead.

🦮 Tutorials / How-tos

• Kubernetes Optimization using In-Place Pod Resizing and Zone-Aware Routing — A nice primer on sizing down Kubernetes pods more effectively to hopefully save some $$$.

• No DNS Terraform Cloud clone — Considering the Terraform Cloud Free tier is going away, I figured I’d share a guide on producing your own.

• 93% Faster Next.js in (your) Kubernetes — If you are dependent on SSR (Server-Side Rendering) and planning to host on Kubernetes, this guide is worth a read.

• Building Kubernetes Operators Course — A great free resource for building Kubernetes operators!

📁 Interesting Projects

• server-survival — Tower defense game that teaches cloud architecture. Build infrastructure, survive traffic, learn scaling.

• Geodesic — A DevOps Linux Toolbox in Docker

• Watt — A node.js application server. If you’re running node.js on Kubernetes, watt is essential.

• Kueue — A cloud-native job queueing system for batch, HPC, AI/ML, and similar applications in a Kubernetes cluster.

📅 Events

• FOSDEM 2026 — Brussels, Belgium · 31 Jan – 1 Feb 2026
  Annual open-source conference with tracks across cloud-native tooling, infrastructure, and collaborative engineering.

• DevConf.cz 2026 — Brno, Czech Republic · Late Jan 2026
  Free, community event with sessions on DevOps, CI/CD, cloud tech, and platform engineering topics.

• Cloud Tech Tallinn 2026 — Tallinn, Estonia · 29–30 Jan 2026
  Cloud and AI-focused sessions, useful for platform teams evaluating multi-cloud and automation strategies.

• Cloud Native Days France 2026 — Paris, France · 3 Feb 2026
  Community-centric cloud native conference with practical talks on Kubernetes, tooling, and platform ops.

• ContainerDays London 2026 — London, UK · 11–12 Feb 2026
  Hands-on workshops and sessions covering Kubernetes, AI integrations, observability, and platform engineering practice.

• PlatformCon 2026 — Virtual & In-Person Days · 22–26 Jun 2026
  The world’s largest platform engineering conference, with 200+ speakers and hundreds of sessions — essential for strategy and tooling insights.

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📰 News

• The Cloudflare Outage That Broke the Internet — Hot off the heels of a major AWS outage, Cloudflare comes with another big impact outage. It’ll be interesting to see if this is a new pattern that’s emerging in cloud infrastructure, and if architectural decisions will start to take account of these events.

• CNCF Retires the Ingress Nginx Controller for Kubernetes — PSA if you’re reliant on the nginx controller it will be EOLed in March of next year, which is a pretty quick turn-around if you’re heavily reliant on this.

• My $1k AWS mistake — Many of us (including myself) have made some costly mistakes on AWS and had to deal with some less than fun surprise bills at the end of the month. It comes down to Cloud providers having billing as a lagging indicator where alerts are your only options, rather than strict spending limits. Whether it’s opportunistic money-making dark patterns or simply too difficult to implement properly, the impact is a pretty poor experience for a customer.

• This Is How Much Anthropic and Cursor Spend On Amazon Web Services — When your AWS bill is over 100% of your revenue, you might want to take a bit of glance at Cost Centre once in a while.

• Shai-Hulud 2.0 Supply Chain Attack: 25K+ npm Repos Exposed — If it’s not internet breaking events, it’s NPM supply chain attacks.

🦮 Tutorials / How-tos

• Tutorial: Implement a Nginx Gateway Fabric as an Alternative to Ingress — If you’re looking for a replacement to the soon-to-be deprecated official Nginx Ingress Controller, feels relevant considering the news from the CNCF.

• Terraform Workbook - Your Guide to Infra as Code (IaC) - Want to get started with terraform, this tutorial provides a nice structure to get started with.

• Building a CI/CD Pipeline Runner from Scratch in Python — Part Python tutorial, part CI/CD exercise. It’s likely not going to replace your existing setup, but it’s sometimes good to build things from scratch for fun.

📁 Interesting Projects (and Books!)

• Coolify — An open-source, self-hostable PaaS alternative to Vercel, Heroku & Netlify.

• Zarf - Air gapped Kubernetes, super useful if you're working within a locked down network environment.

• cronmaster — If you ever felt like managing cron needed more dependencies on NPM.

• Kubernetes Autoscaling — I got my hands on an early review copy and if you’re in that niche, it’s a pretty comprehensive read. Covers tools like HPA, VPA, KEDA, and Karpenter. Not sponsored, just a book I really enjoyed!

📅 Events

• AWS re:Invent 2025 — Las Vegas · 1–5 December 2025
  The cloud giant’s annual conference, with sessions on observability, AI integration, and platform automation.

• DevOpsCon Munich 2025 (incl. Platform Engineering Summit) — Munich / Online · 1–5 December 2025
  Conference for CI/CD, Kubernetes, cloud platforms, and DevSecOps, featuring a dedicated Platform Engineering Summit on internal platforms, self-service, and DevEx.

• ContainerDays London 2026 — London · 11–12 February 2026
  Cloud-native and Kubernetes conference with strong focus on platform engineering, AI-powered platforms, and hands-on workshops for platform and DevOps teams.

• QCon London 2026 (Platform Engineering Track) — London · 16–18 March 2026
  Practitioner-driven software conference with a full platform engineering topic track covering IDPs, paved paths, and socio-technical architecture for platform teams.

• KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2026 — Amsterdam · 23–26 March 2026
  CNCF’s flagship cloud-native event, where platform teams can dive into Kubernetes, service meshes, observability, and the broader ecosystem powering modern platforms.

• CNCF Platform Engineering Day @ KubeCon EU — Amsterdam · 23 March 2026
  Co-located event dedicated to platform engineering, internal developer platforms, Backstage/IDP ecosystems, and real-world lessons from platform teams across industries.

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📰 News

• The AWS Outage That Broke the Internet — News that few could miss: the huge us-east-1 AWS outage that took down dozens of major services, including Alexa, Fortnite, and Snapchat. There’s no shortage of analysis — from smart-beds gone rogue, to the risks of single-region dependence, to speculation on Amazon’s strategic brain drain.

• GitHub Will Prioritise Migrating to Azure Over Feature Development — GitHub (and LinkedIn) have attempted and failed to do this in the past, so now the corporate overlords are requiring GitHub to dogfood Azure over serving customers. Perhaps just acquiring everyone will be Microsoft’s long term strategy to increase Azure market-share?

• Why Your Platform Engineering Career Is Really a Sales Job — A sharp observation that good platform engineers aren’t just builders — they’re sellers. Success hinges on convincing developers to adopt your platform, not forcing them to.

• Why Up to 70% of Platform Engineering Teams Fail to Deliver Impact — Another article on why “Platform as a Product” coupled with compelling metrics is the way to do platforms. Most teams falter due to weak adoption, unclear value, and misaligned goals.

• Ulysses’ Odyssey: Lessons for Platform Engineering — Fun little read, where Greek mythology meets platform engineering in a metaphor-laden piece on resilience and iteration.

🦮 Tutorials / How-tos

• Migrating from AWS to Hetzner — With the recent AWS outages, I figured it was worth sharing yet another “I moved all my stuff to Hetzner and saved $$$”.

• Applying RBAC to Databases on Kubernetes: Practical Real-World Examples — Walk-through on applying Kubernetes RBAC principles to database workloads — ideal if you’re managing Postgres or MySQL inside clusters.

• Spec-Driven Development Using Markdown as a Programming Language — I like the idea of spec driven development to deliver small projects to reduce the amount of non-deterministic behaviour in AI, so this was a nice guide from GitHub.

• Building a 1-Million-Node Kubernetes Cluster — Building a 1 million node k8s clusters, because why not?

📁 Interesting Projects

• Flightcontrol — A Heroku-like PaaS that deploys directly into your AWS account, providing simplicity without giving up control.

• k7 — A lightweight orchestrator for running isolated VM sandboxes — think mini-VMs for reproducible environments.

• Replik8s — A modern open-source Kubernetes auditing tool focused on security and policy enforcement.

• Sparky — A flexible and minimalist CI server.

📅 Events

• KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2025 — Atlanta, Georgia · 11–14 November 2025
  Keynotes, CNCF project updates, and plenty of platform-engineering sessions — including OpenTofu Day and BackstageCon NA.

• Platform Engineering Executive Roundtable (KubeCon NA) — Atlanta, Georgia · 11 November 2025
  Hosted by Platform Engineering Org — invite-only roundtable for leaders discussing the evolving role of internal platforms.

• AWS re:Invent 2025 — Las Vegas · 1–5 December 2025
  The cloud giant’s annual conference, with sessions on observability, AI integration, and platform automation.

• QCon San Francisco 2025 — 17–21 November 2025
  Tracks include platform engineering, resilient architecture, and large-scale systems design.

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📰 News

• How we made ClickHouse log queries 99.5% faster with resource fingerprinting — Leveraging resource fingerprints, so blocks can be skipped more aggressively.
  🔗https://signoz.io/blog/query-performance-improvement/

• Will Amazon S3 Vectors Kill Vector Databases — or Save Them? — S3 have added vector DBs, which is a pretty significant feature, with folks asking if this will resplace vector DBs or force them to be tiered caches.
  🔗https://zilliz.com/blog/will-amazon-s3-vectors-kill-vector-databases-or-save-them

• Docker Desktop bug let containers hop the fence with ease — PSA a critical bug in docker allowed containers to talk to Docker’s Engine API, without auth, enabling host-level access. Containers by themselves aren’t always the isolated environment they claim to be.
  🔗https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/26/docker_desktop_bug/

• s1ngularity: supply chain attack leaks secrets on GitHub — The attack compromised GitHub tokens & NPM creds, injected malicious versions of the Nix package, leaked secrets and ran malware on dev machines/CI pipelines. 🔗https://www.wiz.io/blog/s1ngularity-supply-chain-attack

• AWS services scale to new heights for Prime Day 2025: key metrics and milestones — Always an interesting read to see how Amazon has handled the scale.
  🔗https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-services-scale-to-new-heights-for-prime-day-2025-key-metrics-and-milestones/

• Atlassian + DX: Engineering Intelligence for the AI Era — In an interesting move, Atlassian has purchased DX, it might be a good fit but might just give managers more charts.
  🔗 https://www.theregister.com/2025/09/18/atlassian_dx_purchase/

• Kubernetes Finally Solves Its Biggest Problem: Managing Databases — K8s is making progress on better handling stateful systems as first-class citizens.
  🔗https://thenewstack.io/kubernetes-finally-solves-its-biggest-problem-managing-databases/

🦮 Tutorials / How-tos

• Hierarchical Federation in Prometheus: Managing Millions of Metrics Cleanly — Lower level Prometheus is for detailed metrics and higher level aggregate servers pull summaries to help scale Prometheus.
  🔗https://kapillamba4.medium.com/hierarchical-federation-in-prometheus-managing-millions-of-metrics-cleanly-8d8bac940ff3

• GitHub Actions: A Cloudy Day for Security – Part 1 (Securing GH Actions) — Considering the recent supply chain attacks focusing on dev machines and CI pipelines, it’s prudent to focus on securing Github Actions and CI Pipelines in general.
  🔗 https://binarysecurity.no/posts/2025/08/securing-gh-actions-part1

• How I Learned System Design — Going from overwhelmed to mastery, by breaking topics down and practising real-world problems.
  🔗 https://medium.com/@himanshusingour7/how-i-learned-system-design-d7444d454367

• AWS Cost Optimization – Key Principles for Beginners — Practical primer on controlling AWS spending via cost allocation, tagging and rightsizing.
  🔗https://awsfundamentals.com/blog/key-principles-for-cost-optimization

📁 Interesting Projects

• Onedev — Open Source self-hosted Devops Platform with Git, CI/CD, issue tracking, Kanban, package registry & more!
  🔗https://github.com/theonedev/onedev

• Kubewall — Sinary-binary K8s dashboard with multi-cluster support.
  🔗https://github.com/kubewall/kubewall

• Trailscaper — CLI tool to extract and query insights from AWS Cloudtrail.
  🔗https://github.com/flosell/trailscraper

• GHBuster — Datadog tool to detect suspicious GitHub repositories and users using heuristics
  🔗https://github.com/DataDog/ghbuster

• kconnect — CLI tool to discover and securely access K8s clusters across cloud environments (EKS, AWS, Rancher)
  🔗https://github.com/fidelity/kconnect

📅 Events

• KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America
  📅 November 10–13, 2025 | 📍 Atlanta, Georgia, USA
  🔗 https://events.linuxfoundation.org/kubecon-cloudnativecon-north-america/

• Platform Engineering Summit (Enterprise)
  📅 October 22–23, 2025 | 📍 London, UK
  🔗 https://www.iqpc.com/events-platform-engineering-summit

• DevOpsCon New York (with Platform Engineering focus)
  📅 September 29 – October 3, 2025 | 📍 New York, USA / Online
  🔗 https://devopscon.io/new-york/

• Platform Engineering Day (co-located with KubeCon NA)
  📅 November 10, 2025 | 📍 Atlanta, Georgia, USA
  🔗 https://events.linuxfoundation.org/kubecon-cloudnativecon-north-america/co-located-events/platform-engineering-day

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📰 News

• AWS in 2025: The Stuff You Think You Know That’s Now Wrong — What’s new in AWS (as in, in the last 20 years)? The highlight: “us-east-1 is no longer a merrily burning dumpster fire of sadness and regret.”
  🔗 https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/aws-in-2025-the-stuff-you-think-you-know-thats-now-wrong/

• AWS CEO on Entry-Level Tech Jobs — Some rare common sense from AWS leadership. Who would have guessed?
  🔗 https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/21/aws_ceo_entry_level_jobs_opinion/

• AWS Back On Brand: Kiro Pricing Bugs — And just like that, we're back to “surprise” bills and busted pricing.
  🔗 https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/18/aws_updated_kiro_pricing/

• Kubernetes Isn’t Enough for a Production-Ready Platform — Raw Kubernetes doesn’t make a platform. The article nails it: platform engineering is about developer experience, not YAML.
  🔗 https://thenewstack.io/kubernetes-isnt-enough-for-a-production-ready-platform/

• Funding Open Source Like Public Infrastructure — If your platform runs on open source, this one’s for you. It's time we start funding the things we depend on.
  🔗 https://dri.es/funding-open-source-like-public-infrastructure

• AWS Deleted My 10-Year Account Without Warning — A bit of a storm in a teacup, but still: a good reminder to keep tabs on your billing. The full story (and recovery) is worth a look.
  🔗 https://www.seuros.com/blog/aws-deleted-my-10-year-account-without-warning/
  🔗 https://www.seuros.com/blog/aws-restored-account-plot-twist/

🦮 Tutorials / How-tos

• 6 Honest Questions When Building a Platform — Despite the clickbait title, this post hits some real points about when a platform actually makes sense.
  🔗 https://log.andvari.net/6reasons.html

• Deploying a Tetris Game on AWS ECS with Terraform — Need an excuse to play and learn? Tetris + Terraform = joy.
  🔗 https://blog.praveshsudha.com/how-to-deploy-a-tetris-game-on-aws-ecs-with-terraform

• Build Your Own SaaS Cloud Platform with Kamaji + GitOps — Kamaji continues to fly under the radar, but this is a solid walkthrough of building a multi-tenant SaaS offering.
  🔗 https://itnext.io/build-your-own-saas-cloud-platform-with-kamaji-and-gitops-aeec1b5f17fd

📁 Interesting Projects

• Zizmor — Static analysis for GitHub Actions. CI/CD security tends to be an afterthought—this is a step in the right direction.
  🔗 https://github.com/zizmorcore/zizmor

• tfclean — A small tool to clean up unused Terraform resources. Finally.
  🔗 https://github.com/takaishi/tfclean

• Edka — Run Kubernetes on Hetzner, because cloud doesn’t have to be expensive.
  🔗 https://edka.io/

📅 Events

• KubeCon + CloudNativeCon (India)
  📅 August 13–15, 2025 | 📍 Hyderabad, India
  🔗 https://events.linuxfoundation.org/kubecon-cloudnativecon-india/

• Conf42 Platform Engineering 2025
  📅 September 4, 2025 | 📍 Online
  🔗 https://www.conf42.com/platform2025

• DevOpsCon New York (with Platform Engineering Summit)
  📅 September 29 – October 2, 2025
  🔗 https://devopscon.io

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📰 News

• The future is not self-hosted — A nicely honest read on self-hosting: niche hobbyism won’t scale beyond tech nerds. I’m intrigued—and terrified—by the idea of a community‑hosted Internet. 🔗 https://www.drewlyton.com/story/the-future-is-not-self-hosted/

• Supply chain attack alert: npm “is” package infected — The popular npm package “is” was compromised with cross‑platform malware. Ends poorly. 🔗 https://www.theregister.com/2025/07/24/not_pretty_not_windowsonly_npm/

• Introducing Kiro — Yet another VSCode AI-fork. I signed up to ~1) play spec-driven dev and ~2) get free Claude code—but it turns out I wasn’t alone in that idea… as FYI AWS slapped usage limits on it. 🔗 https://kiro.dev/blog/introducing-kiro/

• AWS offers bigger free tier—$200 in credits — The drug dealer’s back with a stronger fix. Looks like AWS is just catching up here. 🔗 https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-free-tier-update-new-customers-can-get-started-and-explore-aws-with-up-to-200-in-credits/

• Amazon Q self-destructs — Summary says it all: a hacker PR got merged, told Amazon Q to nuke your infra, and Amazon shipped it! 🔗 https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/amazon-q-now-with-helpful-ai-powered-self-destruct-capabilities/

🦮 Tutorials / How-tos

• Prometheus labels: Understanding and best practices — A neat CNCF post on why labels matter and how to structure them. 🔗 https://www.cncf.io/blog/2025/07/22/prometheus-labels-understanding-and-best-practices/

• Nothing But Nix for GitHub Actions — How to get tons of performance and storage for free on GitHub Actions. Bonus: it's also talked about on this linuxmatters.sh episode. 🔗 https://wimpysworld.com/posts/nothing-but-nix-github-actions/

• Webinar: The art of the possible with MCP Servers — I hosted a webinar on building internal dev platforms with MCP servers and Kratix. Less “how-to,” more “what could be possible.” 🔗 https://www.linkedin.com/events/7346810420655022081

📁 Interesting Projects

• theProtector — Bash observability done simply. Why complicate things? 🔗 https://github.com/IHATEGIVINGAUSERNAME/theProtector

• kgateway — A new Envoy-based gateway just accepted into CNCF. Worth checking out for cloud-native ingress. 🔗 https://www.cncf.io/blog/2025/07/23/project-spotlight-kgateway/

• FossFLOW — A shiny open-source infrastructure diagramming tool. Pro-level mapping without enterprise lock-in. 🔗 https://github.com/stan-smith/FossFLOW

• vet — Adds extra security around those curl | bash commands you probably shouldn’t run. 🔗 https://github.com/vet-run/vet

📅 Events

• 5 Takeaways from PlatformCon 2025: From “great” platforms to doing AI right (Webinar)
  📅 July 31, 2025 | 🕖 7:00 PM CEST
  🔗 https://platformengineering.org/events/5-takeaways-from-platformcon-2025-from-great-platforms-to-doing-ai-right-2025-07-31

• DevOpsCon New York (with Platform Engineering Summit)
  📅 September 29–October 2, 2025
  🔗 https://devopscon.io

• Conf42 Platform Engineering 2025
  📅 September 4, 2025 | Online
  🔗 https://www.conf42.com/platform2025

• KubeCon + CloudNativeCon (India)
  📅 August 13–15, 2025 | Hyderabad, India
  🔗 https://events.linuxfoundation.org/kubecon-cloudnativecon-india/

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📰 News

• What Would a Kubernetes 2.0 Look Like — Some great ideas in here (kill etcd being one of the less original ones), but still—native package management and HCL are great suggestions (anything for less YAML…).
  🔗 https://matduggan.com/what-would-a-kubernetes-2-0-look-like/

• Kaniko has finally officially been archived | r/kubernetes — More a PSA, but Google’s Kaniko has officially been archived. Just a reminder that just because a project has big name backers doesn’t mean it’s got longevity. (Though Kaniko hasn’t appeared on killbygoogle yet…)
  🔗 https://www.reddit.com/r/kubernetes/comments/1l2dto9/kaniko_has_finally_officially_been_archived/

• Is Datadog Becoming a Platform Engineering Company? | The New Stack — Datadog moving into the platform engineering space. Our cloud bills are trembling….
  🔗 https://thenewstack.io/is-datadog-becoming-a-platform-engineering-company/

• Goodbye AWS: How We Kept ISO 27001, Slashed Costs by 90% | Datapult — I know, another article saving $$$ by moving off AWS. Any cost-savings that involve multiple months of engineering work is often dubious, but it’s an interesting thing to ponder when you look at last month’s AWS bill.
  🔗 https://medium.com/@accounts_73078/goodbye-aws-how-we-kept-iso-27001-slashed-costs-by-90-914ccb4b89fc

• A Day in the Life of Server #47B-2: An AWS Data Center Memoir | Last Week in AWS — OK this is just a kinda fun idea—the life and times of an AWS server. The stories they could tell!
  🔗 https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/a-day-in-the-life-of-server-47b-2-an-aws-data-center-memoir/

• Google Cloud Service Health — This GCP outage was a serious one and again, the best way to find out where everything’s hosted (if Cloudflare isn’t cloud-agnostic, what chance do the rest of us have?).
  🔗 https://status.cloud.google.com/incidents/ow5i3PPK96RduMcb1SsW

🦮 Tutorials / How-tos

• Smart Uses of imagePullSecrets in Kubernetes Cluster with ServiceAccounts | CNCF — Attach imagePullSecrets to service accounts and reduce your YAML. Always a win.
  🔗 https://www.cncf.io/blog/2025/06/20/smart-uses-of-imagepullsecrets-in-kubernetes-cluster-with-serviceaccounts/

• Easy Steps to Deploy Super Mario Game on AWS EKS Using Terraform | DEV Community — I can appreciate someone trying to make learning K8s fun. Definitely one to try out.
  🔗 https://dev.to/aws-builders/easy-steps-to-deploy-super-mario-game-on-aws-eks-using-terraform-4oi

📁 Interesting Projects

• czhu12/canine — Power of Kubernetes, simplicity of Heroku. Quite a neat idea, particularly if you can get self-hosted apps up and running quickly. Could streamline my homelab quite a bit!
  🔗 https://github.com/czhu12/canine

• NickTikhonov/snap-ql — AI-powered Postgres client. I mean, I’d probably give this thing read-only access only—but even then it might generate a SELECT statement that kills your server.
  🔗 https://github.com/NickTikhonov/snap-ql

• apple/container — A tool for creating and running Linux containers using lightweight virtual machines on a Mac. It’s written in Swift and optimised for Apple silicon. Feels rare to share Apple projects here, but this looks like a nice tool to manage and run Linux containers on your Mac.
  🔗 https://github.com/apple/container

📅 Events

• PlatformCon Day – London
  📅 June 25, 2025
  In-person Live Day for platform engineers in London.
  🔗 https://kube.events/conferences

• PlatformCon Day – New York
  📅 June 26, 2025
  New York in-person Live Day following PlatformCon.
  🔗 https://kube.events/conferences

• DevOpsCon Berlin (Hybrid)
  📅 June 16–20, 2025
  Four days of CI/CD, Kubernetes, DevSecOps talks and workshops.
  🔗 https://devopscon.io/berlin

• KubeCon + CloudNativeCon China
  📅 June 10–11, 2025
  Flagship Kubernetes conference in Asia.
  🔗 https://www.cncf.io/kubecon-cloudnativecon-events

• KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Japan
  📅 June 16–17, 2025
  Asia‑Pacific edition of the cloud-native flagship conference.
  🔗 https://www.cncf.io/kubecon-cloudnativecon-events

• Cloud Native Days Italy
  📅 June 24, 2025 | Bologna
  Regional event focusing on cloud-native tech.
  🔗 https://kube.events/conferences

• Building the Future: Platform Engineering & IaC with Kief Morris
  📅 July 10, 2025 | Chicago
  Talk and book signing from the author of Infrastructure as Code.
  🔗 https://www.finos.org/featured-events

• Cloud Native Summit Munich
  📅 July 22, 2025
  Community‑driven European event on cloud-native tools and best practices.
  🔗 https://kube.events/conferences

• DevOpsCon 2025 (New York)
  📅 September 29 – October 2, 2025
  Cloud platforms, microservices, Kubernetes, automation, and continuous delivery.
  🔗 https://devopscon.io

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📰 News

• Whose code am I running in GitHub Actions? — Interesting breakdown of how GitHub Actions works and the risks involved.

• Introducing Docker Hardened Images: Secure, Minimal, and Ready for Production — Docker looks to be going after Chainguard.

• What We Learned Building a Prototype AI-Driven Dev Interface for Kratix — Written by me, I played with some MCP servers and learned some things.

• 37signals Says Goodbye to AWS: Full S3 Migration and $10M in Projected Savings — 37signals moves off AWS and onto on-prem, saving a projected $10 million.

• Implemented AGPL MinIO Object Browser Simplified Console — MinIO has introduced a Trojan-horse PR innocently named “Implemented AGPL MinIO Object Browser Simplified Console” that removes almost all functionality from the object browser.

• DORA’s Latest Research on AI Impact — Some interesting insights that AI remains a bit of a double-edged sword.

🦮 Tutorials / How-tos

• GitHub Actions Security Guide | Wiz — Practical hardening tips for GitHub Actions. Worth a read if you're still running workflows with overly permissive tokens (you probably are).

• Side-by-Side ECK Operator Upgrade Strategy | Mercari Engineering — A clever Kubernetes operator upgrade technique with minimal risk.

• Scaling PostgreSQL to the Next Level at OpenAI | Pixelstech — OpenAI’s journey in pushing Postgres to its limits.

• To Fix Platform Engineering, Build What Users Actually Want | The New Stack — Platform engineers continue to re-learn how to think like product teams.

📁 Interesting Projects

• AI Native Dev Landscape — Nice site to present the ever-changing AI tooling landscape.

• Tilt — Define your dev environment as code. For microservice apps on Kubernetes.

• Terraform MCP Server — Interact with Terraform using an MCP server, built by HashiCorp.

• Kubetail — Real-time logging dashboard for Kubernetes (browser/terminal).

📅 Events

• PlatformCon 2025
  📅 June 23–27, 2025
  🌍 Hybrid: Virtual sessions and in-person "Live Days" in London and New York
  Join over 40,000 platform engineers for a week of talks, panels, and workshops.

• DevOpsCon 2025
  📍 London: May 12–16
  📍 San Diego: May 19–23
  📍 Berlin: June 16–20
  📍 New York: Sept 29–Oct 2
  Cloud platforms, microservices, Kubernetes, automation, and continuous delivery.

• Conf42 Platform Engineering 2025
  📅 September 4, 2025
  📍 Online
  Talks on building and maintaining scalable, reliable, and secure platforms.
  

🎙️ Webinars

• How Enterprises Can Achieve Success with Platform Engineering
  📅 May 29, 2025 | 🕖 7:00 PM CEST

• Platform Engineering Maturity Roadmap: Insights, Metrics, and Strategies
  📅 June 5, 2025 | 🕖 7:00 PM CEST

• How to Drive the Platform Engineering Revolution
  📅 June 10, 2025 | 🕖 7:00 PM CEST

• Continuous Integration / Continuous Delivery
  📅 June 18, 2025 | 🕔 9:00 AM PT

• Platform Engineering Executive Roundtable (PlatformCon London)
  📅 June 24, 2025 | 🕔 5:00 PM CEST

• Secure Software Delivery
  📅 June 25, 2025 | 🕔 9:00 AM PT

Have platform engineering tips to share? Reply to this email or connect with me on LinkedIn.

Apologies in advance for the avalanche of AI-related news this month. Honestly, the sheer volume of AI hype I'm filtering out is staggering — I mostly blame Google Next. Friendly reminder: if you spot good non-AI stuff, please send it my way for future editions!

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📰 News

• Google Next 2025 Keynote Recap | Google — "Start with the prompt" and "focus on having fun" — interesting advice, considering Abi Noda’s latest research summary which suggests developers mostly just want to... code. Maybe AI can prompt developers to find new fun — like debugging CI failures.

• Google AI Extravaganza Next 2025 by the Numbers | Google — Last year I joked: 218 announcements, 53 mentions of AI, 47 of Gemini. This year? 231 announcements, 190 mentions of AI, 83 mentions of Gemini, 36 mentions of “models,” and “agents” dropped 87 times.

• Can You Get Rich Freelancing with LLMs? | DX — An experiment that might just be insane enough to work. Or not.

• Amazon CEO Shareholder Letter | Last Week in AWS — A pretty hilarious (and biting) read if you want a cynical take on the latest Amazon shareholder optimism.

• Agentic AI in Cloud: TL;DR Edition | The Register — Thankfully, The Register did what none of us wanted to: summarised the growing chaos around Cloud Agentic AI so you don't have to.

🦮 Tutorials / How-tos

• How to Hire a Platform Engineer | The New Stack — A practical guide if you're growing your team (or just want to sharpen your BS radar during interviews).

• Kubernetes Hardening Made Easy with Kube-bench | CNCF — A nice walkthrough and some excellent tooling to make Kubernetes security not sound like you need a PhD.

• Choosing Between Local and Cloud Dev Environments | The New Stack — Local vs Cloud: the eternal developer struggle, explained.

• Foundational Concepts in Platform Engineering | The New Stack — A good 101 if you’re onboarding new folks (or explaining your job to family over dinner).

📁 Interesting Projects

• Coolify | GitHub — A self-hostable Heroku/Vercel alternative. Yes, another one. But this one looks... kinda cool.

• Zev | GitHub — A simple CLI tool to help you remember terminal commands

• Awesome MCP Servers | GitHub — I’ve been playing around with MCP servers lately (especially putting them in front of Kratix tech) and this list has been a real goldmine.

📅 Events

• PlatformCon 2025
  📅 June 23–27, 2025
  🌍 Hybrid: Virtual sessions and in-person "Live Days" in London and New York
  Join over 40,000 platform engineers for a week of talks, panels, and workshops.

• DevOpsCon 2025
  📍 London: May 12–16
  📍 San Diego: May 19–23
  📍 Berlin: June 16–20
  📍 New York: Sept 29–Oct 2
  Focuses on cloud platforms, microservices, Kubernetes, automation, and continuous delivery. ​

• DevOps Pro Europe
  📅 May 20–23, 2025
  📍 Vilnius, Lithuania & Virtual
  Covers core DevOps concepts, patterns, and practices.

🎙️ Webinars

• Minimum Viable Platform 101: The Ultimate Platform Engineering Framework
  Mallory Haigh, Platform Engineering Workshop Host
  📅 April 29, 2025 | 🕖 7:00 PM CET
  Building your first MVP platform without tears.

• Platform Engineering: Why Hype Isn't Enough for Adoption
  Ajay Chankramath, CTO @ Brillio
  📅 April 30, 2025 | 🕖 7:00 PM CET
  What actually breaks platform initiatives after the first sprint.

• Identifying Vulnerabilities in Public Kubernetes Helm Charts
  Nigel Douglas, Head of DevRel @ Cloudsmith
  📅 May 20, 2025 | 🕖 7:00 PM CET
  Helm charts: great for convenience, also great for attackers. Yay security.

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📰 News

• You Can No Longer Base Your Government and Society on US Clouds With the recent political climate, a LOT of articles have popped up on people moving or advocating to move from US based Cloud Services.

• The 'Why Azure is Shit' Feed | Mastodon — At Day 420 (at time of writing), you have to respect that level of consistency in a product.

• IBM Completes Acquisition of HashiCorp | IBM Newsroom — A big acquisition with potentially little fanfare. Is this IBM/Red Hat trying to scoop up ex-VMware users?

• “It’s Not Kubernetes. It’s What It Does.” | CNCF — The CNCF equivalent of ‘you're holding your phone wrong’.

• The Missing Piece in Platform Engineering: Recognising Producers | The New Stack — A fresh perspective on stakeholder roles in platform teams.

• Scaling Platform Building: Unique vs Common | CNCF — A thoughtful dive into balancing org-specific features with reusable platform components.

🦮 Tutorials / How-tos

• Zero-Downtime Deployments on AWS EKS | Glasskube — Best practices to minimise deployment disruption in EKS environments.

• Step-by-Step Guide to Kubernetes Troubleshooting | CNCF — A methodical approach to finding and fixing your K8s issues.

• Handling Billions of Invocations: AWS Lambda Best Practices | AWS — A deep dive into scaling serverless.

📁 Interesting Projects

• Yoke: IaC for Kubernetes | xeiaso.net — A new take on Infrastructure-as-Code, still early, but intriguing.

• Introducing K0rdent: Kubernetes IDPs Simplified | CNCF — Yet another stab at the golden path problem. Worth a look.

• Kubescape Graduates to CNCF Incubation | CNCF — Security visibility for Kubernetes continues to mature.

• Fly-to-Podman | GitHub — A migration tool from Docker apps to Podman. Niche but clever.

• Git-Who | GitHub — Tidy little CLI for figuring out who changed what. Basically git blame, but better.

📅 Events

• Open Source SecurityCon 2025 Announced | CNCF — Mark your calendar: November 10, 2025.

• Platform Engineering Day | KubeCon EU 2025 Co-located Event - April 1st, 2025

• KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe — London, April 1st–4th, 2025

  • What to do around the KubeCon London venue | CNCF Guide

• PlatformCon 2025 — June 23rd- June 27th — Still a ways off, but keep it in mind.

🎙️ Webinars

• Dollars and DevOps: The Business Case for Internal Developer Platforms
  Natan Yellin (Robusta.dev)
  📅 April 8, 2025 | 🕖 7:00 PM CET
  How to prove your platform's ROI.

• From Friction to Flow: Developer Experience with Coder & DX
  Nicky Pike & Justin Reock
  📅 April 15, 2025 | 🕖 7:00 PM CET
  Improving onboarding and reliability via better tooling.

• Backstage Backlash: What Went Wrong?
  Kaspar von Grünberg (Humanitec)
  📅 April 16, 2025 | 🕖 7:00 PM CET
  Lessons from failed platform launches.

• Platform Leadership 101: Why 67% of Platforms Fail
  Mallory Haigh, Platform Engineering Workshop Host
  📅 April 22, 2025 | 🕖 7:00 PM CET
  Common pitfalls and how to avoid them.

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📰 News

• Revisiting Docker Hub Policies: Prioritizing Developer Experience | Docker —In what seems to be the standard bad news company announcement approach, Docker does a last-minute rug pull on unlimited resource requests, then 'revisits' it—aka delaying it by a month instead.

• AWS S3 SDK breaks its compatible services — AWS introduces new integrity checksums in its S3 SDKs—a solid feature, but enforcing it breaks compatibility with third-party object storage. Not a great look.

• Platform Engineering on the Brink: Breakthrough or Bust? - The New Stack —Platform engineering is at a crossroads. Will companies bridge the gap between platform engineers and developers, or will the hype fade? A 'Platform as a Product' mindset seems to be gaining traction.

• Docker Bake: Now Generally Available | Docker — Docker's new 'Bake' tool aims to simplify complex builds by automating tedious tasks and improving build times. Will it deliver?

• Introducing AWS CloudFormation Stack Refactoring | AWS DevOps & Developer Productivity Blog — AWS finally makes it easier to move resources between CloudFormation stacks, reducing the pain of growing complexity and shifting business needs.

🦮 Tutorials / How-tos

• Exploring the Kubernetes API Server Proxy - A fun walkthrough of the Kubernetes API Server Proxy and how it works.

• 10 Terraform Config Root Setups for Scalable Infrastructure (Pt 1) — A practical guide to structuring your Terraform projects for scalability.

📁 Interesting Projects

• Kmesh v1.0 officially released! | CNCF — Kmesh 1.0.0 is here! Worth highlighting as it matures into a full-fledged service mesh!

• GitHub - HeavyHorst/remco: remco is a lightweight configuration management tool — A lightweight configuration management tool, similar to confd but with a bit more flexibility.

• GitHub - cloudon-one/FinOps-Guardian: AWS & GCP FinOps Tools — FinOps-Guardian helps cut AWS/GCP costs—if you’re brave enough to point it at production!

📅 Events

• Kubecon + CloudNativeCon Europe — London, April 1st-4th, 2025

  • KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2025 co-located event deep dive: OpenTofu Day Europe | CNCF — April 1, 2025

  • KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2025 co-located event deep dive: BackstageCon Europe | CNCF — April 1, 2025

🎙️ Webinars

• Backstage: The costliest mistake in platform engineering? — March 04, 2025

• A practical guide to Minimum Viable Platforms (MVPs) — March 11, 2025

• Platform leadership 101: Why 67% of platform initiatives are failing — March 12, 2025

• Platform Engineering Executive Roundtable with Humanitec & codecentric — March 13, 2025

• How enterprises drive successful platform engineering initiatives — March 27, 2025

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📰 News

• Kubernetes in 2025: are you ready for these top 5 trends and predictions? | CNCF — Predictions include increased adoption of AI/ML, edge computing, and tools like Karpenter to boost cluster efficiency.

• Why does Cloudflare Pages have such a generous Free tier? - mattsayar.com — Some interesting theories on why Pages are unlimited—worth checking out!

• Steve Langasek, One of Ubuntu Linux's Leading Lights, Has Died - The New Stack — Mark Shuttleworth wrote a lovely piece on him here.

• Quickwit joins Datadog | Quickwit — The announcement suggests Quickwit's existing product will remain liberally licenced, while the team focuses on internal Datadog projects—though this is completely speculative!

📅 Events

• Reminder! KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe | LF Events — April 1-4, 2025 in London

  • Including Platform Engineering Day - Europe — April 1, 2025 in London

• FOSDEM 2025 — February 1-2, 2025 in Brussels

🎙️ Webinars

• Minimum Viable Platform: Zero to hero — February 4, 2025

• Mastering on-prem platform engineering: The good, the bad, the metal — February 11, 2025

• Platform engineering metrics: The art of Kaizen with Platforms — February 18, 2025

• How enterprises drive successful platform engineering initiatives — February 19, 2025

🦮 Tutorials / How-tos

• So you wanna write Kubernetes controllers? — This is a really nice guide on how to write K8s controllers and what to consider when building them.

• Getting exec buy-in for developer productivity initiatives — No surprise, executive buy-in often hinges on ROI, making this guide a great read for getting started.

📁 Interesting Projects

• GitHub - terrateamio/terrateam — Terrateam simplifies infrastructure automation by integrating GitOps with CI/CD workflows.

• GitHub - zawachte/etcd-k8s-extract: etcd-k8s-extract — A tool to extract Kubernetes resources as YAML directly from etcd snapshots, simplifying backup and restore workflows.

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👋 Just a reminder, I co-host a podcast on cloud technology at Hybrid Cloud Show, if you’re interested in these newsletters it’s definitely worth a listen. 🙏

📰 News

• Is Your Internal Developer Platform Missing Orchestration? - The New Stack — Interesting piece on the challenges of focusing too much on portals and the big day 2 challenges Platform Engineering Teams are facing.

• Introducing the DX Core 4 - by Abi Noda — DX is introducing a new set of metrics that aim to provide a holistic set of measurements cutting across things like DORA, SPACE, etc. Benchmark summaries are here.

• Why we, as knowledge workers, should take care of work-life balance | CNCF — It’s a new year, I felt like it was a good time to share this article from the CNCF on work-life balance, based on Cal Newport’s writing.

• Developer Productivity in 2025: More AI, but Mixed Results - The New Stack — Jennifer Riggins looks to 2025 and what we can expect. More AI and the challenges AI generated code is introducing and what engineers actually want from it.

• And that’s a wrap! | AWS News Blog — Jeff Barr is leaving the AWS news blog after 20 years!

📅 Events

• KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe | LF Events — April 1-4, 2025 in London

  • Including Platform Engineering Day - Europe — April 1, 2025 in London

• SREday - Site Reliability Engineering conferences

  • February 28, 2025 in NYC

  • March 27-28, 2025 in London

• QCon London 2025 — April 7–11, 2025 in London

🎙️ Webinars

• ​​Backstage: Platform engineering dream or nightmare — January 14, 2025

• How enterprises drive successful platform engineering initiatives — January 21, 2025

• Bad abstractions: 5 practical rules for building successful platforms — January 28, 2025

• Minimum Viable Platform: Zero to hero - February 4, 2025

🦮 Tutorials / How-tos

• Understanding k0s: a lightweight Kubernetes distribution for the community | CNCF — How to use k0s, the single binary distribution of Kubernetes!

• k9s - manage your Kubernetes cluster and it’s objects like a pro! | CNCF — A nice visual guide to using k9s to interact with Kubernetes.

📁 Interesting Projects

• aptakube/kubespec.dev: Kubernetes Spec Explorer — An interactive explorer for Kubernetes resources spec. A few things included:- Tree view with schema, type and description of all native resources

• Cyphernetes — A bit of a theme this month, Cyphernetes lets you interact with Kubernetes using SQL.

Have insights, stories, projects, feedback, or tips on platform engineering you'd like to share? Drop me a line by replying to this email for a chance to be featured in our next edition, or connect with me on LinkedIn.

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Platform Engineering Monthly - November 2024 Edition

Welcome to the latest edition of Platform Engineering Monthly, thanks for being here! P.S. Suggestions or ideas for the next edition? Let me know!

📰 News

• Amazon S3 adds new functionality for conditional writes - AWS — This feature has been long overdue in AWS, and before you get excited, there are some caveats. It’s for express zone one, which is more expensive and far less highly available. Hopefully AWS can roll this out to other storage classes and eventually catch-up with Azure from about 10 years ago…

• What causes 'bad days' for developers? - by Abi Noda — The top cause of engineer "bad days"? Unreliable tools, infrastructure issues, and slow processes. The impact of this on engineers? Decreased productivity, more stress, and more self-doubt.

• Dear friend, you have built a Kubernetes — Some insights on how you can over-engineer an internal solution where something more off-the-shelf (like K8s) can give you the same value. However, the premise that the only alternative to K8s is a big pile of shell scripts is suspect.

• The 2024 State of Platform Engineering? Fledgling at Best - The New Stack — This sounds fairly dire, but I think the summary here is “if you’re doing it well, you’re doing it really well and to do it well you need to listen to your customers”. For full disclosure, this is a summary of a very interesting chat in the Platform Engineering Slack Community, which you should definitely join. If you want to delve further into this topic, it’s worth reading up on Platform as a Product.

• I Followed the Official AWS Amplify Guide and was Charged $1,100 - Moving Forward — AWS is a large company with lots of teams and solution architects creating tutorials. These things will always fall through the gaps, and until AWS enables hard spending limits, this will remain an issue.

• We’re leaving Kubernetes — GitPod does a good job breaking down why, for their use-case, Kubernetes was not the best solution for them.

📅 Events

• AWS Re:Invent (Here’s a handy guide for anyone attending) — December 2 – 6, 2024 in Las Vegas, Nevada

• December seems to be a quiet month. If you’ve got interesting events you’d like to add, reach out to me or leave a comment!

🎙️ Webinars

• Platform Engineering Executive Roundtable during AWS re: Invent, Las Vegas (Kaspar Von Grünberg, Humanitec; Rickey Zachary, Thoughtworks) — December 3, 2024

• Multi-cloud Platform Engineering with Crossplane — December 3, 2024 7:00 pm (CET)

• Win at Platform Engineering with Minimum Viable Platforms (MVPs) — December 4, 2024 7:00 pm (CET)

• State of Platform Engineering in 2024: Salary, AI, and more — December 10, 2024, 7:00 pm (CET)

🦮 Tutorials / How-tos

• How To Track DORA Metrics in an Internal Developer Portal - The New Stack — This is timely as the DORA report is show that a lot of organisations aren’t thinking about their customers and aren’t measuring outcomes.

• Platform Engineering: A Guide for Technical, Product, and People Leaders: Fournier, Camille, Nowland — This book is making the rounds as an excellent resource for platform engineering. You may recognise Camille from several excellent Engineering Manager books, in particular The Managers Path.

📁 Interesting Projects

• awslabs/kro: kro | Kube Resource Orchestrator — Kro lets you define reusable ResourceGroups that automate the orchestration and management of resource dependencies within a cluster.

• awslabs/harmonix: A developer portal to meet your Enterprise needs — AWS with a Backstage frontend. Definitely a project to watch.

Have insights, stories, projects, feedback, or tips on platform engineering you'd like to share? Drop me a line by replying to this email for a chance to be featured in our next edition, or connect with me on LinkedIn.

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Platform Engineering Monthly - October 2024 Edition

Welcome to the latest edition of Platform Engineering Monthly, thanks for being here! P.S. Suggestions or ideas for the next edition? Let me know!

📰 News

• AWS and Azure are At Least 4x–10x More Expensive Than Hetzner — As budgets get tighter and companies re-evaluate their cloud strategy, big savings can be found if you’re willing to (and have the people power) to take complexity in-house.

• Announcing the 2024 DORA report | Google Cloud Blog - The 10th annual DORA report has been released, and no surprises AI, Platform Engineering, Continuous Improvement and Developer Experience are all on the uptick.

• AWS's Valkey Play: When a Fork Becomes a Price Cut - Last Week in AWS Blog — AWS has slashed the price of Valkey, making it a cost-saving, drop-in replacement for Redis. Looks like a smart play by AWS to position Valkey as the defacto Redis successor.

• Dominoes Pizza Terraform Provider | Terraform Registry — I mean, I can’t think of a better use-case for terraform.

• Platforms Engineering - Justin Garrison — It’s often easy to get sucked into the Platform Engineering solves everything hype, but this line is the reality for a lot of Platform Engineering teams without them actually acknowledging it: “If your work is being funded by anyone that’s not a development team then developers aren’t your customers.”

• Convert AWS console actions to reusable code with AWS Console-to-Code, now generally available | AWS News Blog — If this can automate the “type delete to really delete the thing”, it’s the greatest AWS innovation all year.

• What three experiments tell us about Copilot’s impact on productivity — Loads of interesting insights, it appears there are big gains in using AI to learn better rather than having AI do your job for you.

📅 Events

• KubeCon + CloudNativeCon - North America 2024 (Plus some tips for first-time visitors) — November 12–14, 2024 in Salt Lake City

• Microsoft Ignite — November 19–21, 2024 in Chicago (and online)

• AWS Re:Invent — December 2 – 6, 2024 in Las Vegas, Nevada

• PlatformCon 2025 has been announced (with two PlatformCon Live Days in NY/London) — June 23-27, 2025

🎙️ Webinars

• Why you need a Minimum Viable Platform (and how to start) (Mallory Haigh, Humanitec) — November 5, 2024

• Platform Engineering for Managers (Droga Architekta IT, Krzysztof Halasa) — November 6, 2024

• Fireside Chat on Cultivating High-Performance Teams (OpsLevel, Abi Noda) — November 6, 2024

• GraphQL Summit Virtual (Apollo GraphQL) — November 7, 2024

• Everything your manager needs to know about platform engineering (Krzysztof Hałasa, khalasa.com) — November 7, 2024

• Platform Engineering Executive Roundtable during Microsoft Ignite, Chicago (Rickey Zachary, Thoughtworks; Luca Galante, Humanitec) — November 21, 2024

• Platform Engineering Executive Roundtable during AWS re: Invent, Las Vegas (Kaspar Von Grünberg, Humanitec; Rickey Zachary, Thoughtworks) — December 3, 2024

🦮 Tutorials / How-tos

• How to Run Databases on Kubernetes: An 8-Step Guide - The New Stack — Offloading DB management to the cloud is often preferred, but if you have good reasons to run them in-house, this guide is a great primer.

• Docker Best Practices: Using Tags and Labels to Manage Docker Image Sprawl | Docker — The sprawl is real, what’s especially helpful here is the OCI have provided a list of recommended tags you can use to narrow down your set of “allowable” tags.

📁 Interesting Projects

• ishantanu/awesome-kubectl-plugins — A curated list of kubectl plugins

• tilt-dev/tilt — Simplifies the K8s dev loop. Tilt watches your code, builds container images, and deploys them automatically to your K8s cluster.

Have insights, stories, projects, feedback, or tips on platform engineering you'd like to share? Drop me a line by replying to this email for a chance to be featured in our next edition, or connect with me on LinkedIn.

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Platform Engineering Monthly - September 2024 Edition

Welcome to the latest edition of Platform Engineering Monthly, thanks for being here! P.S. Suggestions or ideas for the next edition? Let me know!

📰 News

• Platform Manifesto — Manuel Pais of Team Topologies fame has released a new Platform Manifesto, it’s short and worth a read.

• Google Cloud launches Memorystore for Valkey, a 100% open-source key-value service — Google Cloud's is now also officially supporting Valkey to hedge against Redis’s licensing decision.

• Elasticsearch is open source, again — On the theme of licensing, in a very strangely worded update, Elasticsearch returns to its open-source roots.

• Spotify's approach to team autonomy — Abi Noda’s summary of Decentralized decision-making and scaled autonomy at Spotify is well worth the read, particularly coming from a company as influential in this space as Spotify.

• Gartner Magic Quadrants — The new quadrants have been released for 2024, of interest are the ones for Container Management (poor Canonical), DevOps Platforms and Analytics and BI Platforms

• Kubernetes turns 10: a ditty dedicated to a decade of container orchestration — Celebrating a milestone in K8s, this ditty this needs to be experienced.

• Docker Myths Debunked — Clarifies some basic but common misconceptions about Docker.

📅 Events

• Conf42 Kube Native 2024 — September 26, 2024 - Online

• KubeDay Colombia — October 9, 2024 in Medellín

• Kubernetes Community Days UK — October 22, 2024 in London

• KubeCon + CloudNativeCon - North America 2024 — November 12–14, 2024 in Salt Lake City

🎙️ Webinars

• How to master your Minimum Viable Platform (MVP) — September 24, 2024

• How to build the perfect Internal Developer Platform with Humanitec and Port — September 25, 2024

• How to drive a successful platform engineering initiative in the enterprise — October 1, 2024

• Building an open-source platform for a 105-year-old company — October 2, 2024

🦮 Tutorials / How-tos

• Hacking misconfigured AWS S3 buckets: A complete guide — Understanding and preventing S3 bucket misconfigurations.

• GCP to AWS Migration: Step-by-Step Guide 2024 - Cloudwards — A comprehensive guide for migrating from Google Cloud to AWS.

• How to install plugins in Kubernetes and essential plugins to get started — Enhancing your Kubernetes setup with useful plugins using Krew.

📁 Interesting Projects

• Reclaim the Stack — An open-source platform engineering stack, think self-hosted Heroku.

• Pulumi ESC (Environments, Secrets, and Configuration) — A new project from Pulumi attempting to tame secrets and configuration complexity across all cloud infrastructure.

• Winter Soldier — Scale down unnecessary workloads in Kubernetes.

Have insights, stories, projects, feedback, or tips on platform engineering you'd like to share? I’ll share them in the Reader's Corner! Drop me a line by replying to this email for a chance to be featured in our next edition, or connect with me on LinkedIn.

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📰 News

• My IRC client runs on Kubernetes — Sometimes we were so focused on whether we could, we never stopped to ask if we should. Super cool project though, I love ideas that leverage Kubernetes for self-hosting!

• Thank You to the Stack Overflow Community for Ranking Docker the Most Used, Desired, and Admired Developer Tool — Docker continues to dominate as a crucial tool in the developer ecosystem.

• AWS Shield vs WAF: A Complete Guide in 2024 - Cloudwards — A comprehensive comparison to help you choose the right AWS security solution.

• Cloud Functions is now Cloud Run functions — event-driven programming in one unified serverless platform — Some more Google Cloud rebranding that’s worth being aware of.

• Coming soon: the Certified Backstage Associate certification for developers and platform engineers — CNFC is releasing a new certification! Backstage seems to have the mindshare (right now) and it’s a complex enough offering to warrant a new certification.

• How AWS powered Prime Day 2024 for record-breaking sales — Some pretty cool insights (with data) into the scale and capabilities of AWS infrastructure.

• How developers want to use AI tools — Abi Noda’s review of a paper on how developers view AI, how they want to use it, and what their top concerns are in adopting it.

• Score accepted as a CNCF Sandbox Project — Score is an open source workload spec that is the newest project to join the CNCF ecosystem.

• 5 Hacks Learned by Writing Thousands of Lines of IaC — Some solid foundational tips for Infrastructure as Code practitioners.

• Are Shared Service Platforms Too Restrictive? - The New Stack — This article explores the balance between standardisation and flexibility in platform engineering. It’s a common tension in organisations and doesn’t have a “one-size fits all approach”, so I imagine this topic will continue to dominate for the foreseeable future.

• New Study Finds 93% of Enterprise Platform Teams Face Major Challenges With Cloud Cost Management, Kubernetes Complexity and Boosting Developer Productivity - Business Wire — Not all smooth sailing managing Kubernetes clusters in Platform Engineering teams, it’s a fairly comprehensive study highlighting the current challenges in platform engineering.

📅 Events

• "The Hows & Whats of DORA" — August 27, 2024

• Discussion on Reliability challenges in Production LLMs. — August 29, 2024

• Kubefirst Live episode 42 with Matt Gowie, CEO/CTO of Masterpoint — August 29, 2024 at 3PM EST

• Pints with Pulumi featuring Pulumi Founder Eric Rudder — September 4, 2024 at Williamsons's Tavern, London

• K8s Resilience workshop — September 9-11, 2024

• How to build a slack chatbot for auto-RCA — September 19, 2024

• CNCF inaugural San Francisco meetup featuring a panel discussion on cloud native tech future with Dagger, Wiz, Pulumi and CloudFlare — August 29th in San Francisco

Webinars and Roundtables

• GenAI for observability in the serverless world — August 27, 2024, 45 min

• How to drive a successful platform engineering initiative in the enterprise — August 29, 2024, 45 min

• Backstage is not enough to build your platform — September 4, 2024, 45 min

• How to build your Minimum Viable Platform (MVP) in 2hrs — September 5, 2024, 2hrs

• How to design your platform backend — September 11, 2024, 45 min

• How to master your Minimum Viable Platform (MVP) — September 24, 2024, 45 min

🦮 Tutorials / How-tos

• Ambient mesh: can sidecar-less Istio make your application faster? — For anyone in K8s world, Istio without a sidecar looks to have some promising looking performance benefits.

• Docker Best Practices: Understanding the Differences Between ADD and COPY Instructions in Dockerfiles — It’s some welcome clarity on the technical differences in some common Dockerfile instructions, which hopefully help with better container builds.

• SSO and RBAC: a secure access strategy for your Kubernetes — A well-structured guide on how you can deploy Kubernetes security with Single Sign-On and Role-Based Access Control.

• Explain infrastructure as code (alternatives to IaC) — Exploring options beyond traditional IaC approaches, specifically Infrastructure from Code. I’m not sure if I’m convinced, but it’s interesting to see what alternatives are out there.

• Master Prometheus on Kubernetes: Spotting every issue without alert fatigue — A helpful topic, it’s often tricky to get the balance of alerting right, and this video shows an approach to effective monitoring with Prometheus.

📁 Interesting Projects

• GitOpper: GitOps Without Kubernetes — A tool for applying GitOps principles outside of Kubernetes environments.

• See the impact on your cloud costs as you code — A really neat idea to highlight the environmental and cost impact of your project.

• Meet OpenShift Lightspeed, Red Hat's AI tool for Kubernetes admins - ZDNet — Red Hat's new AI-powered tool for Kubernetes administration.

• Neon: A serverless open-source alternative to AWS Aurora Postgres — A very interesting approach to highly scalable databases, without the Cloud. I hope more projects like this come about, as we need more genuine open source competition in this area.

• Dokku — Another excellent open source project, Dokku self-hosted Platform-as-a-Service that helps developers focus on their applications. Basically Heroku, self-hosted.

Have insights, stories, projects, feedback, or tips on platform engineering you'd like to share? I’ll share them in the Reader's Corner! Drop me a line by replying to this email for a chance to be featured in our next edition, or connect with me on LinkedIn.