​​For today’s Donations Monday, I’d like to remind you once again about the UA Responders foundation that works in the medical and rehabilitation field.

We cooperate with them for the DevOps Days Ukraine conference since the beginning of the full scale invasion.

Here's the direct link to donate:
https://uaresponders.org/donate/

#donations #Ukraine

​​I'm back from a brief vacation, hence there was no newsletter last Friday. While, I'm catching up with things, you can help our friends from DOU and complete their survey about Ukrainian companies (in Ukrainian).

https://jobs.dou.ua/questionary/

The next issue of the newsletter comes tomorrow 🤞

A new issue of the CatOps Digest is here:

https://newsletter.catops.dev/p/catops-digest-2025-09-26

#digest #newsletter

As you may have already guessed from the newsletter, a recording of my talk alongside the other talks from FW Days DevOps is available now on YouTube.

So, like, subscribe, and so the rest of the YouTube dance for the great FW Days team :)

#slides

​​A friend of mine helps raising funds for the telecommunication equipment for the 3rd Separate Assault Brigade.

https://send.monobank.ua/jar/ACxqFDBnmp

This jar works with Apple Pay. I’ve tried it myself (since many Monobank jars do not support Apple Pay for whatever reason).

#donations #Monday

A bundle of book bundles!

1. Cybersecurity Month bundle by O’Reilly.
2. Cisco Networking book bundle for certification preparation.

I recall, that having CCNA was a badge of honor when I was a student. I never had one. Mostly, because I was a bad student.

P.S. When dealing with HumbleBundle, always check what books you have already! I think, the Cisco bundle was featured before.

#books #humblebundle

Is it the first supply chain attack in the MCP world?

A fake Postmark MCP was secretly BCCing all the emails.

Postmark is an SMTP provider. They have already put a statement that it was not developed by them.

The moral of the story is not to blindly trust 3rd party software that doesn’t come from your vendor. Another interesting thing is that the attack itself has nothing to do with LLMs, but the attackers are using the hype around everything AI to embed their malicious code.

#security #ai

Speaking of MCPs. 2 new MCPs from AWS are available:

- AWS API MCP
- AWS Knowledge MCP

News via AWS Feed

#aws #ai

An idea worth nothing without the implementation, they say. But what to do, if your ideas are discarded at your company, so you are never given the time and resources for the implementation?

In his article "Quiet Influence: A Guide to Nemawashi in Engineering", one of our subscribers shares an approach of convincing your management of ideas worth trying.

At some point in the career, skills like that are getting more and more important. So, it's very limiting to ignore the people skills for one's progress.

#culture #mgmt

​​For today’s Donations Monday, I’d like to share with you a standing jar of one of the UAV units in which serves a guy from my wife’s small town.

They use this jar continuously to cover their needs for different equipment such as FPV drones, etc.

https://send.monobank.ua/jar/4WLw91UqFe

Card number:

5375 4112 2187 4204

#donations #Ukraine

These days, you can use Kubernetes for the same things you used to use OpenStack.

In this short video Volodymyr Tsap - a member of our community - shares a quick demo of their recent project - Kube-DC.

#kubernetes #self_hosted

You may have seen this news already, but it's still worth sharing in my opinion.

Terraform adds a new language concept called "actions". It's interesting, because while HCL evolved through time, basic concepts such as resources, data sources, variables, and locals remained the same.

In nutshell, Actions are basically provider-approved local-execs: provider developers can add specific imperative tasks, such as invoking an AWS Lambda, that you can later attach to your resource's lifecycle.

The concept is not new, you were likely already doing this with provisioners, local and remote execs, and other hacks. Now, it's just more universal and straightforward.

The only thing is that actions are up to provider developers to implement, so do not expect many of them available from the get-go.

#terraform #hashicorp

A small article about goroutines leaks in Go and the ways to detect that.

Another tip is from Dave Cheney himself: never start a goroutine without knowing how it will stop.

#programming #go

There’s a lot of fluff around about how one should be a technical leader, yet the exact understanding of what is leadership is rather vague.

Here’s a nice Friday read on the topic that resonated with me.

Here’s a great quote:

>>>
The more comfortable you become with not being the expert, the more effective you become as a leader.
When you stop trying to out-expert the experts, you can focus on what expert teams actually need:
- Clear problem definitions
- Context for decision-making
- Translation between different perspectives
- Protection from unnecessary complexity
- Space to do their best work

#culture

​​It’s Monday, fellas.

A friend of mine is raising money for a Starlink and 3 power stations for the 5th Separate Heavy Mechanized Brigade and 33rd Separate Mechanized Brigade.

You can donate via to this Monobank jar (Apple pay works):

https://send.monobank.ua/jar/3VEQNLAcia

Almost half of the goal is already there.

#donations #Monday

I like it, when people talk about definitions, especially for some common / widely use terms. The more common a term is, the more one is "afraid" to ask about it. And since we cannot glimpse into other people's minds, we can talk about completely different things using the same words.

Availability Models talks about the definitions of "high availability" - incredibly popular term in computer science! It doesn't examine all the availability models, despite its name. Rather, this article brings up a question: so, what the heck is "high availability" and how can we define that based on our actual needs?

P.S. Also, I didn't know about the PACELC theorem. It always feels so cool to learn something new!

#databases #programming #system_design

A bundle of Python programming books by Pearson.

While Python won't be my first choice, sometimes it's inevitable. Also, Pearson usually have great books!

#books #programming #humblebundle

A new issue of the CatOps Digest is here!
https://newsletter.catops.dev/p/catops-digest-2025-10-17

One week later than it should have been released, but oh well...

#digest #newsletter

Nice weekend read about technical blogging.

https://writethatblog.substack.com/p/thorsten-ball-on-technical-blogging

One of the best ways to learn is to try to explain whatever you have learned to someone else. Blogging is a form of that.

Perhaps, we can dedicate a day to share the blogs we like here on CatOps, let me know, if you think, it’s a good idea.

#culture

​​Since AWS has an outage, some of you have unplanned time off anyway. So, it's a good time to make a donation to a noble cause!

A friend of mine has a supportive jar for INSCIENCE who partnered with the Come Back Alive foundation to raise money to combat enemy UAVs.

https://send.monobank.ua/jar/fKfgmjgw1

Her goal is 20k UAH, so we can easily achieve it!

P.S. Apparently, Monobank hosts in AWS, since their web paged did not renew once I sent the donation.
P.P.S. Despite N26 also being on AWS, they processed the transaction just fine.

#donations #Ukraine

​​Speaking of AWS:

Oct 20 2:01 AM PDT We have identified a potential root cause for error rates for the DynamoDB APIs in the US-EAST-1 Region. Based on our investigation, the issue appears to be related to DNS resolution of the DynamoDB API endpoint in US-EAST-1. We are working on multiple parallel paths to accelerate recovery. This issue also affects other AWS Services in the US-EAST-1 Region. Global services or features that rely on US-EAST-1 endpoints such as IAM updates and DynamoDB Global tables may also be experiencing issues. During this time, customers may be unable to create or update Support Cases. We recommend customers continue to retry any failed requests. We will continue to provide updates as we have more information to share, or by 2:45 AM.

#aws #outage