CatOps

21 January 2026 16:34

Bring Back Ops Pride is a new article by Charity Majors on how it comes that the operational work is often seen as of lower importance, and why is it bad.

This is her answer to the comments under her another article “You Had One Job”: Why Twenty Years of DevOps Has Failed to Do it. This article has some interesting ideas, but it's a marketing material, so beware.

#ops #culture

CatOps

19 January 2026 12:35

For today's donations Monday, I'd like to share once again the standing Monobank jar for FPV equipment.

This jar is for the unit in which a guy from my wife's hometown serves.

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

#donations #Monday

CatOps

16 January 2026 18:05

Another Friday read on the Culture debt.

The core idea behind it is the same as for the technical debt, but this time it’s about the culture. As company growths, relationships within it inevitable change. This is silly to ignore these changes. Yet, if nothing is done, the culture can drift away, and then it’s much harder to fix, than refactoring a couple of services.

Also, this line strikes hard, when talking about the symptoms of the culture debt: “What you reward diverges from what you say you value.”

People are quite good in calling bullshit on someone or something. It’s often quite obvious when proclaimed values are just empty slogans. This erodes trust as nothing else.

#culture

CatOps

13 January 2026 10:56

A topic on Reddit that argues for a new term - Claude Hole. This is when AI is tasked with fixing an issue, but you actually end up further away from the fix after the AI changes.

This reminded me of a completely unrelated article - I Was Kidnapped by Deutsche Bahn and All I Got Was 1.50 EUR - in that story, the author also ended up further away from their destination than at the beginning of their journey.

Regardless of your views on AI, distinguishing good from bad becomes more and more valuable these days.

#ai

CatOps

07 January 2026 10:25

Our job is all about tradeoffs.

This article describes tradeoffs of database indices.

#databases

CatOps

05 January 2026 11:43

​​I'm back!

It always feels nice to start a new year from scratch. Unfortunately, it's often not the case, and we have to finish things that remained.

Today's fundraiser is one of those things: let's help a friend of mine to raise funds for a pickup truck for the Zaporizhzhia front lines:

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

#donations #Ukraine

CatOps

23 December 2025 11:14

Monzo - a British neobank - reveals their system that grants engineers temporary elevated access.

tl;dr: They are using AWS Nitro Enclaves for this.

During my time at N26, we also had a system that served the same purpose, albeit it was designed differently.

#security

CatOps

19 December 2025 14:47

Cold-Restart Resilience is an article on what could go wrong, when a system recovers from a total outage. Cases, covered in this article, with some tips on how to solve those:

- Circular bootstrap dependencies
- Using in-memory storage as databases
- Failures when trying to create a quorum
- Failures to fetch a remote dynamic config
- Stale data in leaderless systems

It doesn't mention cascading errors, but those are kinda famous already.

#sre #reliability #systems

CatOps

17 December 2025 17:09

On the positive note: Docker opens access to their hardened images (DHI) to everyone, not just their enterprise customers.

DHI uses a distroless runtime and includes SBOM.

Here you can browse the whole catalog of DHI. Docker asked me to login, though, but I'm definitely not an enterprise customer :D

#docker #security

CatOps

16 December 2025 10:39

Cloudflare shares how they use Terraform in production.

Their setup is quite standard: Terraform, Atlantis, Conftest (OPA). One interesting thing is that they use their in-house tool called tfstate-butler to work around the lack of encryption of the Terraform states. Although, they do not disclose the details of this tool.

Another catchy quote:

>>>
...we do this at a global scale — where a single misconfiguration can propagate across our edge in seconds and lead to unintended consequences.

Yeah... We know, Cloudflare, we know...

#terraform #iac

CatOps

12 December 2025 18:29

A new issue of the CatOps digest is here!

https://newsletter.catops.dev/p/catops-digest-2025-12-12

#digest #newsletter

CatOps

10 December 2025 11:53

This isn't a technical article, but still an important one, I would say. This one is about the importance of making your work visible.

Shadow work in engineering teams.

For better or worse, in many companies, promotion cycle is the popularity contest, therefore you need to act accordingly.

This article is aimed at the managers, but you may find it useful as an individual contributor as well.

#culture

CatOps

05 December 2025 16:04

​​I don't know, when is the point, where we can all collectively agree that front-end frameworks have gone too far in their complexity.

Yet, here you are with the Cloudflare preliminary postmortem:

>>>
A change made to how Cloudflare's Web Application Firewall parses requests caused Cloudflare's network to be unavailable for several minutes this morning. This was not an attack; the change was deployed by our team to help mitigate the industry-wide vulnerability disclosed this week in React Server Components. We will share more information as we have it today.
<<<

https://www.cloudflarestatus.com/incidents/lfrm31y6sw9q

#cloudflare #postmortem

CatOps

03 December 2025 15:04

The bot I used for years to make posts into this channel has finally died. So, it seems like I won't be able to make neat buttons anymore :\

Yet, I have a couple of time-sensitive things for y'all:

- Cybersecurity books bundle by Packt
- Hacking book bundle by No Starch Press

Another time-sensitive topic: our friends at DOU are running their winter salary survey. More participants mean more accurate results, so jump in!

https://dou.ua/goto/rJks

#security #dou

CatOps

28 November 2025 11:28

A new CatOps Digest is here!

https://newsletter.catops.dev/p/catops-digest-2025-11-28

#digest #newsleter

CatOps

20 January 2026 09:30

Wanna become a true Terraform SLOPerator?

Here is a carefully vibecoded solution by Anton Babenko. I can confirm that he checks the docs at least once during his Claude conversations, so you can be confident in the quality :)

Jokes aside, this is a cool Skill for Claude Code, which currently works better than any other official or popular alternative out there.

#terraform #ai #claude

CatOps

17 January 2026 12:21

“How much memory does a Kubernetes node use without the Kubernetes layer”? This is exactly the question From RSS to WSS: Navigating the Depths of Kubernetes Memory Metrics tries to figure out.

And the answer to this question might be harder to get to, as it seems at the first glance.

#kubernetes #systems

CatOps

14 January 2026 17:35

I found a young blog that has some potential. There are two articles so far:

- Frameworks for understanding databases
- Sorted string tables (SST) from first principles

If you've read "Designing Data-Intensive Applications" by Martin Kleppmann and "Database Internals" by Alex Petrov, you may find these articles repeating information from those books. However, unless you actively work on building databases, you may easily forget this information.

So, such articles serve as a great reminder. I enjoy getting back to such "low level" details from time to time. These details help one to better understand the tradeoffs of the end solution, in my opinion.

#databases

CatOps

09 January 2026 10:21

I think, this could be a good Friday read: "When Change Outruns Us" is a tale about sustained progress.


The main point of this article is that smart companies do not push for "constant change for the sake of change", but rather adopt a more cyclic pace, when the periods of extensive work are followed by more relaxed times.

This article is particularly interesting to me, because I've just finished listening to the "Slow Productivity" book by Cal Newport. One of the principles, outlined in that book, is that one should work in their natural pace. However, a constant run is no one's natural pace. Another observation in that book, is that starting from the second half of the XX century, managers started to approximate work by "business", i.e. if you look busy, you do some work, even if in the reality, there are zero outcomes.

Many tech companies like to claim that they are "outcomes-oriented" or "value impact", but in my experience, "business" is still the approximation for work. Especially, once a company growth beyond the size, when everyone naturally knows everyone, as well as what they are doing.

#culture #mgmt

CatOps

06 January 2026 11:51

Starting a new year with a postmortem, eh?

There was a prolonged incident with Kafka at Honeycomb last month. Here you can find a preliminary postmortem for this incident.

"Preliminary" means that there is no root cause analysis yet, but there's already the timeline and the remediation steps.

#postmortem

CatOps

27 December 2025 18:11

The last digest of this year is here!

https://newsletter.catops.dev/p/catops-digest-2025-12-27

With this digest been out, I'm taking some holidays. So, there will be no new posts here until the end of the year (it's not like there were many posts in the last couple of days, lol).

Also, I would really appreciate it, if you could share your thoughts about the newsletter in general. Unlike for the Telegram channel, I cannot really find a good fit for it. You can share your thoughts in the comments on Substack, in our chat (in Ukrainian), or via info@catops.dev

🎄🎄🎄 Happy holidays! 🎄🎄🎄

CatOps

22 December 2025 14:57

​​For today’s Donations Monday, I would like to ask to help a friend of mine to get a car at the Zaporizhzhia front lines.

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

This is a personal request, so you can be sure that this fundraiser is legit.

#donations #Ukraine

CatOps

18 December 2025 07:51

Good one. Have literally the same feedback. Cool tech but mostly useless.

https://johnjames.blog/posts/graphql-the-enterprise-honeymoon-is-over

CatOps

17 December 2025 09:30

GitHub Actions will charge $0.002 per minute for self-hosted runners starting from the 1st of March 2026.

Obviously, you would still pay whatever you pay for your self-hosted infrastructure itself.

GitHub Actions will remain free for public repositories. For now.

#cicd #gha #microsoft

CatOps

15 December 2025 20:59

​​For today’s Donations Monday, let’s help Serhii Sternenko with his initiatives:

- Rusoriz - a standing Monobank jar. The goal is to buy 300 FPV drones daily.
- Fundraiser for the interceptor drones

#donations #Monday

CatOps

11 December 2025 17:56

Here's an article on using DRY and KISS principles when working with Terraform. In my opinion, this is one of those articles that has a good idea behind it, but lacks a bit in delivery.

KISS vs DRY in Infrastructure as Code: Why Simple Often Beats Clever.

The main take-way is, as usual: use your own judgment when creating abstractions for your infra code. This also applies to all your code.

I do generally agree on the tooling part. This is what Adam Jacobs called "A 200% knowledge problem": when adding an abstraction (a wrapper), you need to understand not only your code and the underlaying technologies, but also each layer of your abstractions. Thus, do not add wrappers unless you have to.

However, this article also touches an important point: you may feel like it's time to introduce an abstraction, but in reality, it's not.

#terraform #iac

CatOps

06 December 2025 11:53

At least Cloudflare is fast in sharing their postmortems.

https://blog.cloudflare.com/5-december-2025-outage/

A curious thing is this:

>>>
Customers that have their web assets served by our older FL1 proxy AND had the Cloudflare Managed Ruleset deployed were impacted. All requests for websites in this state returned an HTTP 500 error, with the small exception of some test endpoints such as /cdn-cgi/trace.
<<<

IIRC, in the previous incident on Nov 18, only the customers on the newer proxy version were impacted. So, one could say that Cloudflare had a single time-distributed total outage.

Another important thing:

>>>
Before the end of next week we will publish a detailed breakdown of all the resiliency projects underway, including the ones listed above. While that work is underway, we are locking down all changes to our network in order to ensure we have better mitigation and rollback systems before we begin again.
<<<

Honestly, looking forward to seeing the write-up. I can only imagine how stressed their team is after taking down a big chunk of the Internet twice in less than 30 days.


#cloudflare #postmortem

CatOps

04 December 2025 14:09

​​Ok, the bot is online again!

Yesterday, I watched a video from KubeCon NA by Denys Vasyliev (in Ukrainian), and at some point they were discussing the dusk of open source, because the major players shifted their focus towards monetization and proprietary solutions.

And just today, I learned that Minio (S3-compatible storage) has been moved into the "maintenance" mode.

Here's a discussion on Reddit about the alternatives.

#open_source #minio

CatOps

01 December 2025 10:39

​​For today’s Donations Monday, let’s help the foundations “Тихо” to raise money for FPV and Vampire drones.

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

This fundraiser was shared by a close friend of mine, so I trust it.

#donations #Ukraine

CatOps

26 November 2025 12:34

https://faun.pub/migrating-from-nginx-ingress-controller-to-kubernetes-gateway-api-using-ingress2gateway-c7e8cef212fa