I've been speaking to recruiters recently about roles in my area.
Almost every set of interviews now has a live coding portion to it.

I've got an interview next week where I've been told I will be asked to live code. When asked what sort of coding, I was told - it could be writing Terraform, Python, writing a helm chart, kubernetes manifests. It will be random on the day.

I've individually done a lot of these. I've been writing Terraform for years, and I do Kubernetes manifests every single day.
However, I might not touch Terraform for months whilst I work on one project. Python might be even longer.

If tasked with a Terraform project, I'll look at some recent work I did, get a feel for it again, and I'm productive pretty quickly.
But just throw me into an interview, and have multiple engineers ask me to live code, and I feel like I would turn to jelly. I can't remember off the top of my head how to do a module for Terraform - give me a previous one I created, I can take it as a template and start rewriting it, looking up functions if I need new things.

Same for Kubernetes. I will take a deployment file and a svc I did for something in the past, copy and paste it into a new file and edit it to fit my new needs. Writing the document from scratch without documentation... I can't remember that for shit. Who does it afresh on every new service?

We often talk about securing the software supply chain in terms of application dependencies. For instance, pinning package versions, maintaining lockfiles, and auditing third-party libraries.

But what about the code that runs our CI/CD pipelines?

GitHub Actions workflows can execute third-party actions, and the security of those dependencies matters just as much when building and deploying software.

The introduction of workflow dependency lockfiles is an interesting step towards making CI/CD workflows more reproducible and secure.

I wrote about this recently, exploring why workflow lockfiles matter and how they fit into the broader software supply-chain security picture.

Read the article: https://amitmerchant.com/ci-pipeline-lockfile/

Curious how others are approaching dependency security in their CI/CD pipelines. Are you already pinning your actions and enforcing similar controls?

I wish to trim my subscriptions to ones worth thewatching time . Who do you watch for K8s, internal platforms, and lately LLM infra (gateways, routing, cost/observability)?
Deep-dives over hype preferred.

Hello fellow devops engineers,

I would like to improve my networking knowledge do you have some suggestion for any udemy or youtube course to become better at networking.

I am not a noob but i feel i am not good with networking. Some suggestion would be helpful

I’m an ML engineer. Last month I got a Slack from marketing asking why “their dashboard” stopped updating. Nobody on my team knew it existed. It was a Lovable app hitting our Supabase with a service key, deployed to Vercel under someone’s personal account, and the person who built it had left.

That got me wondering how common this is. So, for people on platform/eng/IT teams:

• Roughly how many of these are running in your company right now? Could you actually list them?
• When one breaks, who finds out, and who fixes it?
• Have you tried to get a handle on it (inventory, policy, blocking, importing into Retool/Superblocks), and what happened?

Not selling anything. Trying to understand whether this is a real problem or just my company

Hello. i am Starting to learn IT and i still have time to choose my carreer choice. is it wise to try and learn devops or cloud engineering because of AI? im scared that by the time im done with my degree these jobs wont exist.

Was reading about the malicious Claude code extension that show up in Cusor marketplace. The pary that got me was it trying to add an SSH key and open a reverse tunnel l, from something that just look like another editor extension

We talk a lot abt checking npm package and dependencies, but IDE extension feal like one of those thing people install once and forget abt it. Especially with auto updates enbled

Those things make me wonder how much access we are giving these extension without really thinking abt it. Are people actually restricting extension on work machines or is it mostly up to each dev? Curious if anyone team changed anything after this 🤔

Source:https://cursor.com/blog/claude-code-extension-security-notic

I manage a lot of repos, that are changed by multiple devs and every few months it turns into a mess: hundreds of merged branches nobody deleted, PRs that went quiet a year ago, repos nobody has touched since a project ended. GitHub only lets me deal with it one repo at a time, so mostly I just... don't.

Curious how others handle this:

- Do you run a script (gh CLI, an Action), use a tool, or just ignore it?

- What's the most annoying part?

- What would you never trust a tool to do automatically?

Especially interested in hearing from people managing 30+ repos or a team org.

I'm about three-quarters of the way migrating my application infrastructure from ArgoCD to Flux, and man, is it difficult. I had to use both Claude and ChatGPT pretty extensively to parse the absolute mountain of error logs I was getting and correct the pile of bugs that I had inadvertently introduced while setting it up the first time around.

I'm too far into this process to back out, but just in case I finish this process and then realize that I actually didn't want to migrate, which platform is actually used more commonly in the industry, so I should actually spend more energy learning it?

Note, even though I do mention that I used two AI models quite a bit, I only used them for parsing logs and deciding what to do. All of the code is actually handwritten.

I've been voluntold to analyse our Datadog costs because our bills keep going up, and we're paying extra for new features if we go over the committed spend. It's a bit mismanaged across the org. Naturally, I need billing data to do the analysis (and do some MI outside of Datadog).

These endpoints all return 403 Forbidden:

• /api/v2/usage/historical_cost
• /api/v2/usage/estimated_cost
• /api/v2/cost_by_tag/monthly_cost_attribution

I'm an Admin with all relevant billing and usage permissions. Other usage endpoints work fine, and I can see usage data in the UI.

We buy Datadog through a reseller, and I suspect our organisation is a child org under the reseller's parent org. I think that explains why I can't access historical cost data through the API.

Our reseller has gone quiet for quite some time. I've contacted Datadog Sales and Support (I have no idea why we have a direct connection via a shared Slack channel even though we're not direct customers), but they've basically ghosted me.

We're paying for the service, our bills are increasing, and I'm trying to understand where the money goes. Why is accessing our own cost data such a nightmare?

Has anyone dealt with anything similar?

Hi everyone,

What are some quality conferences in Europe worth visiting in 2027?

As the title says, a new colleague recently joined our team, and he uses AI for everything. Not a single Slack message of his comes from his fingertips unfiltered.

The real pain point has been PR reviews. Our team is small, so reviews are hard to come by. I expected that having another teammate would make things smoother since we could share the review load, but his reviews don't add value, and they actually slow down our development cycle more than before.

I like to break my changes into small, digestible chunks that are easy to review. The problem is that he runs Opus 5.5 on xhigh against every change, and it nitpicks things that aren't even in the PR. It could be a two-line documentation change, and he'll comment that some existing code elsewhere in the same file, outside the scope of the change, needs to be modified. He then marks the pull request as "Changes requested" and doesn't re-review it for days on end.

How would you go about discussing this kindly with him?

30K~ DAU, I have full ownership over an infra under AWS/multiple on premise servers.

we use ECS, terraform, instead of ansible I use a deploy.sh that i give to my boxes with terraform, no graceful deploys. we have our own orchestrator (K8S like) for stateful containers that we have to spin up and down very often (median 1 min of uptime per container) with unsafe code coming from AI/users.

I took the place of someone who left that company and explained me nothing, we are 2 devs, nobody understands how this entire infra works expect me. have been adding observability a lot using cloudwatch, multiple alerts so I page myself at the right times, it's stable but we need to scale to at least 5x (an objective the hierarchy gave me). it currently costs 3.5k/month in aws/on premise servers. btw it's not a classical rest api where you run stateless apis and that's it.

I just discovered how redis worked under a distributed system like this, it's quite good :) I have been a postgresql guy but redis has been a saver for our threat model.

I often read here that you should put everything : EKS + K8S, ansible, terraform, make HA, grafana etc.. but since I manage this entire infra I have been resilient to all of this. If I refactor everything right now they have nobody to do the backend (which is also what I do here) -> "startup" role where one guy has multiple roles.

for the terraform it's all AI, I have been doing a lot of modifications and have created a terraform plan under ci cd so I can review myself, I removed a lot of "destruction" like the database, i versioned the s3, versioned the terraform state, put it to a private s3 etc...

there have been big big security issues (xss, csrf, cookie stealing, untrusted code that owns the entire box, shared passwords, untrusted s3 location so you could overwrite other users...) that were there before I got here

nothing rly interesting maybe for you guys in this experience but I have learned a lot, it has been a crescendo experience where i'm getting to understand more and more which tools to put there because I am the one who owns it 100%, and have to also do features (backend) so not much time either.

Hey !

I guess most of us have a lot of admin accesses to tools like AWS, k8s clusters, Datadog, GitHub etc.

How do you contain your agents to read-only or curated permissions? Without restraining your own accesses.

I do have some sort of hook as a guard + a setup on pi.dev that copy my config and extract the read-only accesses only to do so, but it's never completely opaque.

I was checking out how to build a live operational dashboard for a logistics app and found out about composed vs. converged HTAP architectures.
I’ve always been warned never to run heavy analytical aggregations on the primary transactional DB because the contention spikes your transaction latency. But a guide I was reading explained how HTAP systems are handling this now. A “converged” system runs both through the same engine (which sounds risky for resource contention), while a “composed” system actually separates the compute engines and keeps them in sync through shared storage or replication, so each side stays optimised for its own workload.
Apparently, you’re supposed to measure p99 transaction latency while the analytical queries are running, not separately.
If you are running live analytics on operational data, how are you keeping the two from interfering with each other?

we were on buildjet until it shut down in march, been back on stock github runners since and the builds are noticeably slower. team of about 25, linux x64 mostly with a bit of arm

blacksmith, depot, namespace and avrea all look the same on the pricing pages so i cant pick, and every comparison i find is written by one of them lol. also seeing warpbuild and runs-on mentioned

if you picked one and stuck with it, what made you choose it? or did you try a couple and bounce off one

I have an interview tomorrow for a DevOps Engineer position (I have 5+ YOE). The recruiter explicitly told me the interview will be a deep-dive through my CV.

I’m in a massive bind regarding my current/most recent role and need some urgent advice on how to frame it.

The Situation:

• Early this year: I was the lead engineering resource tasked with getting a major product production-ready. The literal day it was ready, a massive reorg hit. The product was stripped from me, and most of its target end-users were laid off.
• Immediately following: I was pivoted to head up another large project for a different internal product. I busted my ass, completed it successfully, and my manager was impressed. Then... another reorg hit. This product was also taken away.
• The past 5+ months: My team was merged with another to form a new SRE team for a completely separate product. The scope was entirely undefined. In fact, one colleague's sole task for the last 4 months was just figuring out what our responsibilities are.

Because of this reorg limbo, I have had zero actual engineering work to do for months. I’ve repeatedly met with my manager and skip-level to voice concerns, but I just get generic corporate hand-waving about a "clear roadmap ahead."

The Dilemma for Tomorrow:
If they deep-dive into what I am doing right now, I see three options, and they all feel terrible:

1. The Brutal Truth: Admit I’ve been sitting on my hands doing nothing due to corporate dysfunction. (Worried this looks toxic or makes me look unmotivated).
2. The Total Lie: Pretend I’m still actively working on those two successful deployment projects and that they were never taken away. (Worried because my poor recall will make it obvious I haven't touched the code recently, and I'll have to fabricate metrics, current challenges, and future roadmaps).
3. The Middle Ground: Pretend I just transitioned off those projects a few weeks ago (similar issue as option 2).

How do I handle this in a technical deep-dive without sounding like a liar or a slacker? Has anyone successfully spun "reorg purgatory" to a hiring manager?

Thanks in advance!

TL;DR: 5+ YOE DevOps engineer with a CV deep-dive interview tomorrow. This year, I built and completed two major projects, but back-to-back corporate reorgs stripped them away. I've spent the last 4 months in team-merger purgatory doing absolutely nothing. Do I tell the truth, lie and pretend I'm still on the projects, or find a middle ground without looking like a slacker?