CatOps

20 August 2025 19:50

OPA is apparently Apple now.

At least the creators and many maintainers of OPA have joined Apple recently.

What does it mean for the project? Time will tell. OPA remains in CNCF. So, this acquisition may be a good thing: at least, now maintainers would have stable income, so the project won't end up like External Secrets Operator

#opa #security

CatOps

18 August 2025 15:15

For today’s donations Monday, I’d like to share with you a charity organization that friends of mine from the music industry created at the beginning of the full scale invasion.

Musicians Defend Ukraine

#donations #Ukraine

CatOps

14 August 2025 13:52

External Secrets Operator is a very popular tool to sync secrets from your credentials storage into Kubernetes. Unfortunately, they have faced the same problem that many open source tools do: lack of resources to either do unpaid work, or hire someone to do things.

They have announced it on Reddit.

What does it mean for the project? Here's an excerpt from their post:

-----
What We’re Still Doing

✅ We’ll still review and merge community PRs

✅ Contributions will be available on the main branch

❌ We’re pausing all release activities: no new versions (including patches, majors, minors)

❌ We’ll stop responding to support issues and GitHub Discussions for now

How You Can Help

If your company depends on ESO - and many do - now is the time to step up. Whether you’re an individual contributor or part of an open source team, we’d love your help.

We’re open to onboarding new maintainers, defining ownership areas, and sharing responsibilities. You don’t need to be an expert - we’ll help you ramp up.

➡️ To get involved, please sign up using this form.

📚 You can also follow this GitHub Discussion for context.

We didn’t want to do this. But too many OSS projects are quietly dying because they’ve been taken for granted - used in production by thousands but maintained by a handful.
-----

#kubernetes #security

CatOps

12 August 2025 14:48

Today, I'd like to share with you two new bundles from Humble Bundle:

- Linux Complete book bundle by Pearson
- Security by Apress book bundle

The first bundle has some amazing books like the "Unix and Linux Handbook" and performance books by Brendan Gregg!

#books

CatOps

08 August 2025 17:41

A new CatOps digest is here!
https://newsletter.catops.dev/p/catops-digest-2025-08-08

#digest #newsletter

CatOps

05 August 2025 16:25

Some time ago, I shared an article from Honeycomb that had a notion of the "durable vs disposable" code. The gist is that there are two fundamental types of code bases: durable (OSes, databases, compilers, etc.) - those that should be predictable and stable; and disposable (PoCs, experiments, etc.).

In her new article, Charity Majors elaborates on this concept. There are some insightful things there. For example, that the cost of software is defined not by how hard is to write the code, but what degree do you need to maintain it. Also:

If I had to guess, I suspect it [writing the code\] won’t be a profession at all so much as a skill set, much like typing or spreadsheets, that any tech-literate modern worker is expected to pick up in order to perform the functions of their job in marketing, sales, product, design, etc.

However

Anything that can be done with disposable code probably will be, because as we all know, durable software is expensive and hard. But disposable software is a skill set; durable code is a profession.

Anyway, this is an interesting read.

#culture #programming #ai

CatOps

01 August 2025 14:59

Today, I'd like to share with you the results of the annual StackOverflow survey, which may be a nice Friday read.

There are some interesting things in this survey. For example, 3/4 of respondents are not happy at their jobs, a bit more than 1/3 works remotely, 84% of respondents used AI this year, and 47% replied that they used them daily.

However, one should acknowledge inherited biases of this survey. A good illustration for is that the fact that 81% have account on StackOverflow: a survey done on the Internet confirmed that people use Internet, you get it...

CatOps

30 July 2025 10:51

"Invert, always invert", - Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, probably.

There is a ton of articles online on how to make your database faster, but how many articles are there about how to make your database slower?

Making Postgres 42,000x slower because I am unemployed is a fun read about how to almost grind Postgres to a halt by only tweaking the postgresql.conf. No specially crafted slow queries - only config.

As the result, the author managed to make his Postgres installation 42 000x times slower compared to the initial benchmarks. tl;dr: tinkering around with the number of IO operations (cache size, vacuum periods, WAL checkpoints) and making the IO single-threaded do the trick here.

#databases #postgresql

CatOps

28 July 2025 13:45

​​For today's Donations Monday, I'd like to remind you about a big fundraiser by DOU UA for the 3rd Assault Brigade, which has recently crossed its 50% milestone!

https://send.monobank.ua/jar/AGK8qiQwQX

More information is available on a dedicated web page (in Ukrainian).

#donations #Monday

CatOps

23 July 2025 20:51

Supercharging Development With Dapr and mirrord.

I want to share this article because of the latter. Mirrord looks very similar to Telepresence - it can mirror traffic from an existing cluster to your local setup instead of spawning things in the cluster itself. It would be great to see a comparison between the two, though.

Dapr, on another hand, is kind of a more niche project. It can abstract different brokers behind a unified API. I first learned about it at CfgMgmt Camp a couple of years ago. The problem is that if you do need to abstract several brokers in the scope of a single codebase, that must be a special case. Also, since you need to keep the API universal, Dapr only provides as many features as the least feature-rich broker does, which is a natural limitation.

Anyway, if you have used Dapr in production, that would be interesting to hear your insights!

#kubernetes

CatOps

21 July 2025 15:47

​​For today’s Donations Monday, I would like to remind you that the fundraiser for the ground drones workshop is still open!

https://send.monobank.ua/jar/2nxQiPG4LU

#donations #Ukraine

CatOps

15 July 2025 15:02

A lot of people dislike Helm, and yet those are the same people, who use it. Rephrasing Bjarne Stroustrup: there are tools that people hate, and tools that no one uses.

Here's yet another example of a fair criticism of Helm.

I think the problem raised by this article lays however deeper that it appears at the first glance. Sure, it is easier to "validate" the plain YAML with your eyes than YAML with GoTemplate logic on top of it. Still, this problem is kind of solved in the "conventional" software engineering already. Normally, you do not reimplement everything from scratch, and you do not read the whole library codebase when doing your import foo. There are downsides, ofc, but somehow this whole industry works.

In my opinion, we should start treating other people's charts (modules, roles, recipes, what have you) as libraries, not "someone else's shell scripts". Thus, tests and documentation shouldn't be an afterthought, even when it comes to the internal things. Moreover, it's on you to write acceptance tests for your use-case. Maintaining some tests is much easier than parsing walls of YAML by yourself, trust me.

P.S. If you're interested in testing of Helm charts (including 3rd-party ones), I have a two-parter on this: Part I and Part II.

P.P.S. I also recall a quote from Kelsey Hightower that YAML is just Kubernetes' Assembly. The fact that you can read and understand it doesn't mean you have to.

#kubernetes #helm

CatOps

11 July 2025 11:34

You probably heard of Figma's AWS bill already. If not, tldr is that they've listed for IPO, which means that they had to disclose their financial information. One of the findings there was that Figma spends roughly $300k a day on AWS, and many people freaked out.

In this article, Corey Quinn puts these spendings into perspective: this astonishing sum is just about 12% of their rolling revenue or $0.7 per active user, which is not that bad.

It's a short, funny read, since Corey has his own style of presenting his opinions:

 HackerNews commenters claimed they could cut Figma’s costs by “at least 30%, often more than half.” Sure, Steven; that seems credible. I’m certain your experience running a Minecraft server uniquely qualifies you to architect infrastructure for 95% of Fortune 500 companies.

CatOps

09 July 2025 17:47

Continuing the topic of AI: CTOs Reveal How AI Changed Software Developer Hiring in 2025 is a collection of testimonies from C-levels and technical leaders on what they pay attention to when hiring people in the AI-age.

There are many interesting and important points there. It's true, that writing code was never the biggest issue. Understanding what you're doing or what the code produced by AI does is crucial today. Especially, when you're hiring people. I don't know about you, but we already have a couple of cases, when candidates were seemingly using an AI assistant at interviews.

One interesting take away is the evolution of the coding challenge. It's not stated in this article explicitly, but we could all agree that take-home assignments are dead. However, some respondents are using code reviews as a challenge: they ask candidates to review the AI-generated code for bugs and possible improvements. This is a very interesting approach that could reveal, how people think about a problem.

So yeah, these two quotes summarize this article quite good:

 everyone's debating whether AI will replace developers, the people actually hiring them are looking for the opposite of what you'd expect.
 They don't want prompt engineers or AI evangelists. They want the developers who can clean up the mess AI creates.

 you're worried about AI taking your job, stop.

CatOps

07 July 2025 11:30

​​My wife is helping to raise funds for the repair shop for the "Omega Wings" unit. They have a unit that takes care of ground drones, and while there are the drones themselves, those require routine maintenance and occasional repairs.

So, these funds are aimed for the equipment for their repair shop: both tools and materials.

The main goal is 300k UAH, this helper jar is 20k.

https://send.monobank.ua/jar/5XD1eci1Ac

I would greatly appreciate your help! 2/3 of the helper jar is already there, so we can easily close it today!

#donations #Monday

CatOps

19 August 2025 13:19

Software Architecture book bundle by O’Reilly.

This bundle looks familiar, so double-check if you have it already before
buying. I’ve checked my books, and it was not there, but still.

#books

CatOps

16 August 2025 15:21

Crossplane 2.0 is out!

Crossplane is a very interesting project, and while I have my own reservations against managing cloud resources with Kubernetes abstractions, I think this project did many things right.

2.0 version takes it a step further. I personally excited abut this part:

~~~
The biggest change in Crossplane 2.0 is that compositions can now include any Kubernetes resource, not just Crossplane-managed infrastructure. This means you can define a composite resource that provisions a database, configures networking, deploys an application, and sets up monitoring, all in one cohesive abstraction.
~~~

This is great! Now, you should be able to define the whole scope of an application with all its infra dependencies as a single artifact, and potentially, ship application templates to manage fleets of similar services. This, in my humble opinion, is the only sane way of providing “a platform” to your developers.

#kubernetes #crossplane #platform_engineering

CatOps

13 August 2025 14:52

Design patterns are important in a way that they allow us all to speak the same language, and align on things just by calling them by their name. Also, more often than not, they do make sense in the real world applications.

It doesn't mean that you need to implement all of them all the time, but it is important to be able to recognize them and apply when they make sense.

Here's an article with some design patterns for microservices that are quite common in the wild.

#system_design

CatOps

11 August 2025 15:45

​​For today's donations Monday, I'd like to remind you about a huge fundraiser by DOU.ua for the 3rd Assault Brigade:

https://send.monobank.ua/jar/AGK8qiQwQX

More info is here (in Ukrainian).

#donations #Monday

CatOps

06 August 2025 12:40

I'm not sure, if you need yet another Kubernetes operator for PostgreSQL, but people on Reddit claim that it's good.

#postgres #databases #kubernetes

CatOps

04 August 2025 13:13

​​A friend of mine is raising funds for a generator and portable batteries for the 36th brigade.

You can donate to the Monobank Jar below:
https://send.monobank.ua/jar/6GhVVifhXG

You can find a report from the previous fundraiser on Instagram

#donations #Ukraine

CatOps

31 July 2025 18:09

There's an interesting discussion on Reddit under an article that META will let job candidates use AI during the interview.

The article itself is behind a paywall, but the comments are more interesting. Apparently, there's no huge backlash against it. Moreover, many folks welcome this change, since it may remove universally hated LeetCode interviews.

Some folks have even mentioned that they allow to use AI on their interviews as well.

At the first glance, it may seem like this would drastically simplify the process (it may). However, it also means that there will be no longer easy to memorize Fibonacci tasks. Instead, it may be a coding interview combined with system design and what not. In any case, this is too early to tell what would be the broader impact of this change. The only certain thing is that the hiring process cannot stay the same in the age of AI.

#hiring #ai

CatOps

29 July 2025 11:23

You likely know about it already, but to reiterate.

Bitnami introduces changes to its catalog from August 28th, 2025.

tl;dr: All the existing images will be moved to the legacy repository, and only the latest tag would be available for free from now on. If you want to continue using their mainline images, you have to pay a subscription fee.

Open source Helm charts will continue being open source, but "enterprise-grade" (whatever that means) charts would be available for subscription as well.

So, check your images & charts!

#kubernetes #docker #bitnami

CatOps

25 July 2025 16:38

Today, I'd like to share two articles on Aurora with you:

- One on how Atlantis migrated their RDS instances for Jira to Aurora
- The second is on the blue/green upgrades functionality in Aurora


#aws #databases #db

CatOps

22 July 2025 20:02

3 Humble bundles in one post!

So, I don’t need to make a post for each of them.

- SQL and Databases by O’Reilly.
- Learn Programming by Zenva
- Linux courses by Packt.

Cheers!

#books #bundle

CatOps

18 July 2025 19:26

By the popular vote, we are doing digests on Friday now. So, here it is!

https://newsletter.catops.dev/p/catops-digest-2025-07-18

#digest #newsletter

CatOps

14 July 2025 12:03

​​Today we continue raising funds for the workshop that repairs ground drones.

2/3 of the goal is already reached. Let's push it towards the completion!

https://send.monobank.ua/jar/2nxQiPG4LU

#donations #Ukraine

CatOps

10 July 2025 10:56

LinkedIn is at it again!

Apparently, the Kafka's creators have overgrown its capabilities, so they decided to create a replacement called Northguard.

Northguard uses different protocol, replicates the data in the different way, and has different client-side. So, it's not an evolution of Kafka - it's its replacement.

Still, Northguard is not open source yet, so we do not have all the information to evaluate it - only some rumors from within LinkedIn. They do plan to open source it eventually, though.

Would it replace Kafka outside LinkedIn as well? I doubt it, Kafka (and more importantly its protocol) has too wide adoption to be thrown away that easily. But still, if we, as humanity, never reinvented the wheel, we would still travel in wooden carts of something...

#data #kafka

CatOps

08 July 2025 18:12

A small article about software development in the time of AI -
Writing Code Was Never The Bottleneck.

As the name suggests, this article is about the fact that although many vendors try to sell their AI coding tools as a "replacement for the developers", the blockers that those tools remove were never the biggest ones.

There are companies that understand that and encourage their employees to do "assisted" development, which in turn can yield great results, if people are not afraid of being fired. What a surprise...

#ai #programming

CatOps

04 July 2025 11:10

Security researches from WIZ have a fun capture the flag challenge for you!

It has monthly challenges and a leaderboard. Feel free to participate!

#security