Is Kubernetes here to stay for a long time?

Is it worh investing time in learning K8s or it will be hidden under PaS? Is it a must have skill for every DevOps in the future or it is expected to be buried under other technologies?

https://redd.it/1q3qgdx
@r_devops

Sci-Fi Author needs your help - "End of Integers"

Hey folks! I'm a career IT Ops Engineer, and Author, with just enough programmatic knowledge to be dangerous. I'm writing a Sci-Fi novel, and need your advice.

It's the year 2711, and I have an android-like bot that works in a research lab. She has a malfunction when her human boss ask her a question that she isn't supposed to answer.

That causes an error that makes her verbalize the terms and conditions of the leasing contract that she's governed by. Not in an informational way, but one that shows she's had a failure and not acting right.

When she's done, there's a one-second pause, followed by the statement End of Integers, which she says like it's a punctuation mark.

EDIT - I want the answer to sound programmatic, but also vague and not possible.

My Dev wife thinks it's a brilliant idea, since there is no such thing as an "end of integers."

My thought is there's a safeguard to keep her from telling anyone what she knows, but the code for the safeguard has a flaw that makes her say End of Integers.

1. Keep this, or use another type of error?
2. If another, which one would make more sense, for what I need to accomplish?

Thank you, and may your Secrets Management never fail, and blow up your Sprint schedule :)

https://redd.it/1q3rjh6
@r_devops

UAT for 40 +

We are rolling out a chatbot for our organization. Leadership wants all of corp tech to be able to soft test the feature and provide feedback. Jira ID, Acceptance Criteria, Pass/ fail, stengths, weaknesses.

Normally i would have test steps but its really launch the bot and ask it questions related to denoscription/acceptance criteria.

My queation. How do you distribute and track something like this? I normally do feature releases which is done via email. This seems like it might be better on a Microsoft form with a power automate to a sharepoint list for metrics. Its 40 + scenarios though as well, add that to the problem on how to distribute and track question.

https://redd.it/1q3tzeb
@r_devops

Company I work for realized AI can’t replace DevOps and now Hiring again

Hi folks, I work as a freelance DevOps engineer, and in 2020–2022 I used to get 2-3 recruiter calls a day.. those were crazy times. It started to slowly fade off, and by mid-2023, although I still managed to get offers, it was noticeably harder.

Currently, the company I’m working at has a large proportion of developers compared to the DevOps team (I’d say \~15% DevOps, 85% devs). Our management tried multiple shiny tools to improve our processes, but we ended up using AI only for PR reviews and even that is mostly for pre-screening. We still have to manually review things since AI makes mistakes and hallucinates.

For past few years usual response around here was "Hey, these guys don’t know how to use AI and .. it’s a skill issue." but imo These folks haven’t dealt with complex infrastructure beyond boilerplate to think AI can automate DevOps.

During the past three years, I've heard all sorts of things: "Everything will be automated," "It’s just the first year of AI wait and see in a couple of years there won’t be dev jobs," "Devin will eliminate engineers.. (LOL to this one)", and so on. All this hype and bubble kept growing, yet where I worked there were no meaningful headcount reductions beyond cutting back on intern and junior roles doing mostly grunt work and boilerplate and even that ended up hurting us.

Anyway, all of this could have remained speculation, if not for the fact that DevOps positions previously considered redundant due to "more efficient processes" are now being filled again, and the 5-6 DevOps engineers on our team are so overworked that we urgently need to hire more people.

In short (TL;DR), I haven’t seen any meaningful AI automation beyond what we already had, nor did it add much real value to our team. At best, it made us slightly more efficient, but at the cost of reduced maintainability and more complexity in the codebase. If you enjoy working in DevOps, there are still plenty of opportunities out there and likely more going forward.

https://redd.it/1q3ugf8
@r_devops

Another Helm Chart for Garage (MinIO Alternative for Homelabs & Small Deployments)

After MinIO abandoned the open-source project, I needed a new S3-compatible object store for my homelab. I tried the usual suspects (SeaweedFS, Ceph, etc.), but Garage stood out for its simplicity and focus on small, geo-distributed clusters.

I have published a Helm chart that goes way beyond the official one, making Garage a drop-in replacement for MinIO with a much smoother experience for Kubernetes users.

Repo: https://github.com/datahub-local/garage-helm1

What makes this Helm chart better than the official one?

1. Automated cluster configuration: No more manual CLI or YAML hacks. Just set your layout, buckets, and keys in values.yaml or secrets and a job will set up them for you.
2. Built-in WebUI: Deploy the Garage WebUI with a single flag for easy management.
3. Gateway API support: Native support for Kubernetes Gateway API (plus Ingress), so you’re ready for modern K8s networking.
4. Grafana dashboard & ServiceMonitor: Get instant metrics and dashboards out of the box.
5. Extra resources: Inject any custom K8s manifest (Secrets, ConfigMaps, etc.) directly via values.yaml.

Big thanks to \#wittdennis — this chart is based on his original Helm chart for Garage!

If you’re looking for a MinIO alternative that’s actually open source and easy to run at home, give Garage (and this chart) a try. Feedback and PRs welcome!

https://redd.it/1q3utve
@r_devops

Those using GitLab + MS Teams - how do you handle MR notifications?

The native GitLab integration for Teams is pretty basic and Microsoft is retiring Office 365 connectors soon.


I've seen tools like PullNotifier for GitHub + Slack, but nothing similar for GitLab + Teams.


Anyone found a good solution for:

\- Getting notified when assigned to review

\- Avoiding channel spam from every commit/comment

\- Tracking which MRs are still waiting for review?


What's your workflow?

https://redd.it/1q3wxtu
@r_devops

What OS do you daily drive, and why?

I'm curious about people working in the field and why you use one OS over another?
Are there tools you've found that only avaliable on your distro of choice, is it because of stability, is it because of less bloat? Maybe it was the only option or you just like it?

https://redd.it/1q3zk3k
@r_devops

Eager to learn ,would love some structure

For the experienced DevOps engineers, if you were to go back to the beginning, what would you do to make sure you have the right skills for DevOps in today’s market?

I want to learn DevOps this year. I tried at the end of last year and I’d feel so discouraged looking at all the tools I am required to learn. I have seen some people say that “DevOps is a senior position job.”

I have an AWS CCP certificate and I have soo much time on my hands.

What advice would you guys give me?

https://redd.it/1q40oud
@r_devops

Experienced sysadmin cannot pass a coding interview. RIP

I'm an experienced sysadmin (15 years) looking for a job, and it looks like most companies are asking for coding skills now. The Leetcode challenges I've attempted do not mirror my experiences with Python at work, and I am banging my head against the "easy" ones.

I am 60% through "Python Data Structures & Algorithms + LEETCODE Exercises" on Udemy, and I still do not recognize the patterns that are presented in Leetcode problems.

Am I digging in the wrong direction here? How should I be studying? Should I switch careers at the age of 40 and become a toilet farmer?

https://redd.it/1q42yvj
@r_devops

Do you also struggle with non-prod environments being left running “just in case”?

Hi everyone,


I’m curious if this is a common issue or just something I’ve seen in a few teams.

In many companies I’ve observed, non-production environments (dev / test / staging) are often left running 24/7, even though they’re only actively used during working hours.

When I ask why they’re not shut down after hours, the most common answer is:
“Just in case we need it.”

Not because they’re actually needed at night, but because people are worried that:
- someone might suddenly need access
- shutting it down could cause problems
- no one wants to be responsible if something breaks

Does this sound familiar to you?

If yes:
- how do you currently deal with this?
- is it mostly a cost issue, a risk issue, or an ownership issue in your team?

just trying to understand how widespread this problem really is.


https://redd.it/1q413fo
@r_devops

Asked to spread into ML-Ops, but it's new territory. Being required to find related certs but unsure where to start.

I'm a DevOps engineer for a fortune 500 tech company. On my team, I'm the sole person in my role. Been here for 6 years. In fact, for my entire org, I'm only 1 of a handful of us. Our CICD pipeline is very solid and simple to maintain. Most of my work centers around DevSecOps instead of just DevOps. I KNOW that my company is paying me less than what I'm worth, but when the market is "iffy", I don't want to rock the boat. I do well in my role, but even 6 years later I still feel like there's a bit of imposter syndrome going on, despite consistently good recognition and reviews.

So I helped out on an AI-centric hackathon with work and provided all kinds of tech-related assistance to the different teams, such as provisioning new cloud products, creating DNS records for them, debugging various issues, things like that.

Afterwards, I'm now being told that for FY26, I have a personal goal of related certification to attain, but it's on me to find the relevant certs with which to get. I know what AI is. I can bust out a set of prompts that are rather decent. That's about the extent of it.

So as a DevOps Engineer, who acts as a consultant for his team on the more technical side of things, I feel it's my responsibility to not only be able to deploy various models, but also interact with various closed models, as well. And this includes Generative AI for text-based resources and image-based resources as the company I work for is one of the largest graphics-related companies in the world, apparently that's important.

So where do I start? I feel I need to know what's involved at a low level, hence the thought about deploying models. Beyond that, it's pretty new territory to me.

https://redd.it/1q44glk
@r_devops

I got tired of "shallow" GCP labs, so I built a soulful, production-ready scenario. Looking for technical feedback.

TL;DR: I created a GCP tutorial scenario as a pilot for a bigger series. It’s designed to read like an engaging article rather than dry documentation. I’m looking for feedback on the architecture and flow.



Hello,

After spending quite a bit of time on GCP designed labs (on CloudSkillsBoost) and courses I came to a conclusion that these either go in depth on very shallow scenarios or they skim over a lot of important stuff in more complex topics. The end status, I feel, is that you end up with this scattered knowledge about the platform that you then might struggle to put together into a secure, prod ready setup.

I decided to build a set of tutorials that don't just give you commands to copy, but explain the why. I’ve poured my personality into this - I wanted to make it an engaging "story" that you actually enjoy reading, rather than just checking boxes and copy pasting the commands.

Here is the TLDR about the scenario from the repository:

## TL;DR - what you'll learn and what we'll use
### GCP Services Used:
- Cloud Build (with Buildpacks)
- Cloud Run (backend)
- Cloud Functions (async processing)
- Pub/Sub
- Cloud SQL (Postgres)


### What you will learn
- How to deploy serverless applications to Cloud Run & Cloud Functions
- How to connect GCP-managed services to resources inside your own VPC (spoiler: it’s not as magical as marketing suggests)
- How to build a secure, end-to-end serverless microservice architecture
- How to apply Principle of Least Privilege (PoLP) to serverless components
- How to avoid Dockerfiles using Buildpacks, reducing ops overhead
- And finally how to tie this all together

I come to you, fellow engineers, to ask for feedback on the the technical accuracy, the flow, and the "engagement" factor. Does this feel like something a mid/senior dev would actually find valuable? My friends haven't been much help in the review department, so I'm reaching out to the community for some honest peer review.


Here's the link to the scenario:
https://github.com/brzezinskilukasz/gcp-tutorials/tree/main/scenarios/1

https://redd.it/1q42g5w
@r_devops

We built a GitHub Action that could have prevented the CrowdStrike outage. It's free.

On July 19, 2024, CrowdStrike pushed a config update that crashed 8.5 million Windows machines. The root cause: 21 fields validated against a 20-field schema. The unvalidated field caused a null pointer exception.

We ran that deployment profile through ARBITER:

Bad deployment:
0.335 null pointer exception ✓ ← RANKED FIRST
0.235 memory access violation ✓
0.149 safe execution ✓
0.120 system crash ✓

Good deployment:
0.257 safe execution ✓ ← RANKED FIRST
-0.068 null pointer exception ✗ ← REJECTED
-0.094 memory access violation ✗ ← REJECTED
-0.176 system crash ✗ ← REJECTED

ARBITER is a semantic coherence gate. It checks if your deployment profile coheres with "safe execution" or "failure modes" before you push.

Add it to your pipeline:

uses: arbiter-engine/arbiter-action@v1

Marketplace: https://github.com/marketplace/actions/arbiter-deployment-coherence-check

It's free. MIT licensed. 26MB deterministic engine.

Your move.

https://redd.it/1q4bzef
@r_devops

A small browser-only page I built for quick config diffs

Been working on a side project over the holidays. Built a small browser only page that lets me paste two configs and diff them locally. It flags changed values and a few things that tend to usually bite.

No accounts, no uploads, no backend. It just runs in the browser.

Hope it helps!

https://configsift.com

https://redd.it/1q4ctjt
@r_devops

ai made shipping faster but understanding slower



lately i’ve been thinking about how different building feels now compared to a few years ago. getting something off the ground is insanely fast. scaffolds, endpoints, ui, all done in a weekend. but when something breaks, i’m spending way more time reading than actually writing code.

i’ve ended up using different tools depending on what i’m working on. GitHub Copilot for in-editor autocomplete and quick suggestions, Replit Agent when i want help across bigger chunks of work, Claude Code when i need to talk through a codebase at a higher level. and on larger or messier repos, i’ve found cosine surprisingly useful to trace how logic flows across files when my mental map falls apart. it’s not doing magic, it just helps me see what already exists without burning energy.

it feels like the bottleneck shifted from “can i build this?” to “do i actually understand what’s already here?” curious how others are dealing with this. do you stick to one ai tool, or do you end up with a stack where each thing does one job well?

https://redd.it/1q4ermd
@r_devops

looking for good agile tools - how do you keep github issues and planning in sync?

we rely heavily on github, but things get messy when issues turn into real work items. how are teams syncing commits, PRs and sprint work without constant manual updates? i am looking for good agile tools that dont slow devs down

https://redd.it/1q4i05z
@r_devops

Wrote a deep dive on sandboxing for AI agents: containers vs gVisor vs microVMs vs Wasm, and when each makes sense

https://www.luiscardoso.dev/blog/sandboxes-for-ai

Wrote this after spending too long untangling the "just use Docker" vs "you need VMs" debate for AI agent sandboxing. I think the problem is that the word "sandbox" gets applied to four different isolation boundaries with very different security properties.

So, I decided to write this blog post to help people out there.

Interested in what isolation strategies folks here are running in production, especially for multi-tenant or RL workloads.

https://redd.it/1q4pvy6
@r_devops

researching the best subnoscription management software 2026, outgrowing our billing spreadsheets.

our saas company is moving from a handful of enterprise clients to a true product led growth model with hundreds of self serve subscribers. our manual billing and account management processes are breaking. were planning our 2026 tech stack and know we need a dedicated subnoscription management platform to handle billing, dunning, prorations, and plan changes.

when i search for the best subnoscription management software, the big names (chargebee, recurly, zuora, stripe billing) all seem strong, but its hard to understand the nuances for a b2b saas company at our stage. we need solid revenue recognition, tax handling, and flexible pricing models (seats, usage, flat fee).

if any finance, operations, or product folks at a scaling saas company have recently gone through this evaluation, id appreciate your perspective. we need a platform that can scale with us for the next 5 years. any real world insights are invaluable.

https://redd.it/1q4thrg
@r_devops

What are some fresh, underrated tools or products you’re loving right now?

doesn’t have to be strictly DevOps, just anything that made your workflow smoother, solved an annoying problem, or sparked a little “why didn’t I try this earlier” moment. What’s on your radar lately?

https://redd.it/1q7qv2o
@r_devops

Feeling stuck IN career as an SRE

I’m currently working as a Site Reliability Engineer. My role is mostly operational — setting up and tweaking YAMLs, running cloud operations on Azure, keeping applications stable, handling container and web application deployments, troubleshooting lower env and production issues, fixing pipeline failures and build issues, and working closely with multiple DevOps teams. I also manage monitoring and observability using Datadog and Splunk.

I don’t usually build CI/CD pipelines from scratch or create Kubernetes clusters end to end — my work is more about operations, reliability, and incremental improvements rather than greenfield builds.

I have around 11 years of experience, earn a good salary, and hold certifications including Azure Architect, GCP ACE, Terraform, and AWS Associate. On paper things look fine, but lately I feel stuck career-wise. I don’t feel like I’m moving up anymore, either in responsibility or role scope.

I’d especially love to hear from senior, staff, or principal engineers (or managers who’ve coached people at that level): how did you break out of this kind of plateau, and what changes actually made a difference?

I’m curious — has anyone else been in a similar situation at this stage of their career?

What did you do to move forward?

Any advice or perspectives would be really appreciated.

https://redd.it/1q7ci6t
@r_devops

Got screwed on MLOps project payment - $11k paid out of $18k, need advice

Hey folks,
So I'm in some BS situation right now and honestly don't know if I'm being paranoid or actually getting shafted.
Started a contract gig ~4 months back. Client needed their ML stack unfucked - they had data scientists pushing models to prod with literally zero pipeline, no monitoring, nothing. My job was:
Spin up proper MLOps infra on AWS (SageMaker + custom containers), Get their LLM stuff production-ready (they were running GPT wrappers with no fallbacks lmao),
Build out some agentic workflows for their support chatbot, Set up proper observability - Prometheus/Grafana, cost tracking, the works
Lock down their IAM because it was a dumpster fire
Rate was $18k split across 3 milestones - $6k each for planning, implementation, and deployment/handoff.
Here's where it gets weird:
First $6k hit my account fine. Second milestone, I shipped the entire ML pipeline, containerized everything, got their models deploying automatically. Invoice them, get... $2.5k. Ask WTF, they say "we're reviewing costs quarterly now" and me be like Ok!.
I didn't go aggressive because tbh I had like $9k buffer saved up and my project pipeline was dry. Figured I would finish strong, they would see the value, make it right.
Fast forward - I'm basically done. Their LLM agents are handling 60% of tickets autonomously, inference costs down 40%, everything's monitored. I even wrote runbooks for their junior devs. Invoice the last $6k.
Two weeks of ghosting, then they schedule a call. Offer me $3.2k as "completion bonus" bringing total to like $11.7k.
Their reasoning: "timeline extended beyond scope and we had infrastructure costs we didn't anticipate."
Bro. The timeline extended because THEY kept pivoting on which LLM provider to use (we went OpenAI -> Anthropic -> back to OpenAI). The infra costs went DOWN because of my work. I literally showed them the FinOps dashboards.
I'm sitting here like...? Do I just take the L and move on? My savings are getting thin and I don't have another gig yet, so part of me is like "just take the $3k and don't make enemies."
But another part is pissed because the work is legitimately good and in production making them money.
What would you do & I should do?
Anyone been in something similar? I had some rascals earlier who didn't paid me , Ignored my reachouts after the contract work was done , They is a special place in hell for these guyzz ..

https://redd.it/1q7iv92
@r_devops