This week on Ship It Weekly, Brian’s theme is basically: the “automation layer” is not a side tool anymore. It’s part of your perimeter, part of your reliability story, and sometimes part of your budget problem too.

We start with the n8n security issue. A lot of teams use n8n as glue for ops workflows, which means it tends to collect credentials and touch real systems. When something like this drops, the right move is to treat it like production-adjacent infra: patch fast, restrict exposure, and assume anything stored in the tool is high value.

Next is AWS quietly raising prices on EC2 Capacity Blocks for ML. Even if you’re not a GPU-heavy shop, it’s a useful signal: scarce compute behaves like a market. If you do rely on scheduled GPU capacity, it’s time to revisit forecasts and make sure your FinOps tripwires catch rate changes before the end-of-month surprise.

Third is Netflix’s write-up on using Temporal for reliable cloud operations. The best takeaway is not “go adopt Temporal tomorrow.” It’s the pattern: long-running operational workflows should be resumable, observable, and safe to retry. If your critical ops are still bash scripts and brittle pipelines, you’re one transient failure away from a very dumb day.

In the lightning round: Kubernetes Dashboard getting archived and the “ops dependencies die” reality check, Docker pushing hardened images as a safer baseline and Pipedash.

Links

SRE Weekly issue 504 (source roundup) https://sreweekly.com/sre-weekly-issue-504/

n8n CVE (NVD) https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2026-21858

n8n community advisory https://community.n8n.io/t/security-advisory-security-vulnerability-in-n8n-versions-1-65-1-120-4/247305

AWS price increase coverage (The Register) https://www.theregister.com/2026/01/05/aws_price_increase/

Netflix: Temporal powering reliable cloud operations https://netflixtechblog.com/how-temporal-powers-reliable-cloud-operations-at-netflix-73c69ccb5953

Kubernetes SIG-UI thread (Dashboard archiving) https://groups.google.com/g/kubernetes-sig-ui/c/vpYIRDMysek/m/wd2iedUKDwAJ

Kubernetes Dashboard repo (archived) https://github.com/kubernetes/dashboard

Pipedash https://github.com/hcavarsan/pipedash

Docker Hardened Images https://www.docker.com/blog/docker-hardened-images-for-every-developer/

More episodes and more details on this episode can be found on our website: https://shipitweekly.fm

This is a guest conversation episode of Ship It Weekly (separate from the weekly news recaps).

I sat down with Danny Teller, a DevOps Architect and Tech Lead Manager at Tipalti, to talk about internal developer platforms and the reality behind “just set up a developer portal.” We get into Backstage versus internal IDPs, why adoption is the real battle, and why platform/DevEx maturity matters more than whatever tool you pick.

What we covered

Backstage vs internal IDPs Backstage is a solid starting point for a developer portal, but it doesn’t magically create standards, ownership, or platform maturity. We talk about when Backstage fits, and when teams end up building internal tooling anyway.

DevEx muscle (the make-or-break) Danny’s take: the portal UI is the easy part. The hard part is the ongoing work that makes it useful: paved roads, sane defaults, support, and keeping the catalog/data accurate so engineers trust it.

Where teams get burned Common failure mode: teams ship a portal first, then realize they don’t have the resourcing, ownership, or workflows behind it. Adoption fades fast if the portal doesn’t remove real friction.

A build vs buy gut check We walk through practical signals that push you toward open source Backstage, a managed Backstage offering, or a commercial portal. We also hit the maintenance trap: if you build too much, you’ve created a second product.

Links and resources

Danny Teller's Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/danny-teller/

matlas — one CLI for Atlas and MongoDB: https://github.com/teabranch/matlas-cli

Backstage: https://backstage.io/

Roadie (managed Backstage): https://roadie.io/

Port: https://www.port.io/

Cortex: https://www.cortex.io/

OpsLevel: https://www.opslevel.com/

Atlassian Compass: https://www.atlassian.com/software/compass

Humanitec Platform Orchestrator: https://humanitec.com/products/platform-orchestrator

Northflank: https://northflank.com/

If you enjoyed this episode Ship It Weekly is still the weekly news recap, and I’m dropping these guest convos in between. Follow/subscribe so you catch both, and if this was useful, share it with a platform/devex friend and leave a quick rating or review. It helps more than it should.

Visit our website at https://www.shipitweekly.fm

This week on Ship It Weekly, Brian kicks off the new year with one theme: automation is getting faster, and that makes blast radius and oversight matter more than ever.

We start with Cloudflare’s “fail small” mindset. The core idea is simple: big outages usually come from correlated failure, not one box dying. If a bad change lands everywhere at once, you’re toast. “Fail small” is about forcing problems to stay local so you can stop the bleeding before it becomes global.

Next is Pulumi’s push to be the control plane for all your IaC, including Terraform and HCL. The interesting part isn’t syntax wars. It’s the workflow layer: approvals, policy enforcement, audit trails, drift, and how teams standardize without signing up for a multi-year rewrite.

Third is Meta’s DrP, a root cause analysis platform that turns repeated incident investigation steps into software. Even if you’re not Meta, the pattern is worth stealing: automate the first 10–15 minutes of your most common incident types so on-call is consistent no matter who’s holding the pager.

In the lightning round: a follow-up on GitHub Actions direction (and a quick callback to Episode 6’s runner pricing pause), AWS ECR creating repos on push, a smarter take on incident metrics, Terraform drift visibility, and parallel “coding agent” workflows.

We wrap with a human reminder about the ironies of automation: automation doesn’t remove responsibility, it moves it. Faster systems require better brakes, better observability, and easier rollback.

Links from this episode

SRE Weekly issue 503 (source roundup - CloudFlare) https://sreweekly.com/sre-weekly-issue-503/

Pulumi: all IaC, including Terraform and HCL https://www.pulumi.com/blog/all-iac-including-terraform-and-hcl/

Meta DrP: https://engineering.fb.com/2025/12/19/data-infrastructure/drp-metas-root-cause-analysis-platform-at-scale/

GitHub Actions: “Let’s talk about GitHub Actions” https://github.blog/news-insights/product-news/lets-talk-about-github-actions/

Episode 6 (GitHub runner pricing pause, Terraform Cloud limits, AI in CI) https://www.tellerstech.com/ship-it-weekly/github-runner-pricing-pause-terraform-cloud-limits-and-ai-in-ci/

AWS ECR: create repositories on push https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2025/12/amazon-ecr-creating-repositories-on-push/

DriftHound https://drifthound.io/

Superset https://superset.sh/

More episodes + contact info, and more details on this episode can be found on our website: https://shipitweekly.fm

This is a guest conversation episode of Ship It Weekly (separate from the weekly news recaps).

I sat down with Eric Paatey, a Cloud & DevOps Engineer who’s been transitioning from full-stack web development into cloud/devops, and building real skills through hands-on projects instead of just collecting tools and buzzwords.

We talk about what that transition actually feels like, what’s helped most, and why you don’t need a rack of servers to learn DevOps.

What we covered Eric’s path into DevOps How he moved from building web apps to caring about pipelines, infra, scalability, reliability, and automation. The “oh… code is only part of the job” moment that pushes a lot of people toward DevOps.

The WHY behind DevOps Eric’s take: DevOps is mainly about breaking down silos and improving communication between dev, ops, security, and the business. We also hit the idea from The DevOps Handbook: small batches win. The bigger the release, the harder it is to recover when something breaks.

Leveling up without drowning in tools DevOps has an endless tool list, so we talked about how to stay current without burning out. Eric’s recommendation: stay connected to the industry. Meet people, join user groups, go to events, and don’t silo yourself.

The homelab mindset (and why simple is fine) Eric shared his “homelab on the go” setup and why the hardware isn’t the point. It’s about using a safe environment to build habits: automation, debugging, systems thinking, monitoring, breaking things, recovering, and improving the design.

A practical first project for aspiring DevOps engineers We talked through a starter project you can actually show in interviews: Dockerize a simple app, deploy it behind an ALB, and learn basic networking/security along the way. You don’t need to understand everything on day one, but you do need to build things and learn what breaks.

Agentic AI and guardrails We also touched on AI agents and MCPs, what they could mean for ops teams, and why you should not give agents full access to anything. Least privilege and policy guardrails matter, because “non-deterministic” and “prod permissions” is a scary combo.

Links and resources Eric Paatey on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/eric-paatey-72a87799/

Eric’s website/portfolio: https://ericpaatey.com/

If you enjoyed this episode Ship It Weekly is still the weekly news recap, and I’m dropping these guest convos in between. Follow/subscribe so you catch both, and if this was useful, share it with a coworker or your on-call buddy and leave a quick rating or review. It helps more than it should.

Visit our website at https://www.shipitweekly.fm

This week on Ship It Weekly, Brian looks at real platform engineering in the wild.

We start with Cloudflare’s write-up on building an internal maintenance scheduler on Workers. It’s not marketing fluff. It’s “we hit memory limits, changed the model, and stopped pulling giant datasets into the runtime.”

Next up: AWS databases are now available inside the Vercel Marketplace. This is a quiet shift with loud consequences. Devs can click-button real AWS databases from the same place they deploy apps, and platform teams still own the guardrails: account sprawl, billing/tagging, audit trails, region choices, and networking posture.

Third story: TEAM (Temporary Elevated Access Management) for IAM Identity Center. Time-bound elevation with approvals, automatic expiry, and auditing. We cover how this fits alongside break-glass and why auto-expiry is the difference between least-privilege and privilege creep.

Lightning round: GitHub Actions workflow page performance improvements, Lambda Managed Instances (slightly cursed but interesting), a quick atmos tooling blip, and k8sdiagram.fun for explaining k8s to humans.

We close with Marc Brooker’s “What Now? Handling Errors in Large Systems” and the takeaway: error handling isn’t a local code decision, it’s architecture. Crashing vs retrying vs continuing only makes sense when you understand correlation and blast radius.

shipitweekly.fm has links + the contact email. Want to be a guest? Reach out. And if you’re enjoying the show, follow/subscribe and leave a quick rating or review. It helps a ton.

Links from this episode

Cloudflare https://blog.cloudflare.com/building-our-maintenance-scheduler-on-workers/ AWS on Vercel https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2025/12/aws-databases-are-available-on-the-vercel/ https://vercel.com/changelog/aws-databases-now-available-on-the-vercel-marketplace TEAM https://aws-samples.github.io/iam-identity-center-team/ https://github.com/aws-samples/iam-identity-center-team GitHub Actions https://github.blog/changelog/2025-12-22-improved-performance-for-github-actions-workflows-page/ Lambda Managed Instances https://docs.aws.amazon.com/lambda/latest/dg/lambda-managed-instances.html Atmos https://github.com/cloudposse/atmos/issues k8sdiagram.fun https://k8sdiagram.fun/ Marc Brooker https://brooker.co.za/blog/2025/11/20/what-now.html

This is a Ship It Weekly conversation episode. The weekly news recaps are still weekly. These interviews drop in between when I find someone worth talking to and the convo feels useful.

In this episode I’m joined by Mazharul “Maz” Islam (DevOps with Maz). Maz is a UK-based DevOps Engineer who shares practical, real-world DevOps content on YouTube and LinkedIn. We talk about the stuff that actually matters when you’re building systems, running infrastructure, owning reliability, and living in on-call.

We hit three big things: the importance of understanding the WHY behind DevOps (not just the tools), how to upskill and keep up with the industry without burning out, and what the agentic AI era might look like for DevOps, SRE, and platform engineering teams. We also touch on MCPs and AI agents, and what “leveling up” looks like for companies that want to move faster without breaking everything.

If you’re into DevOps culture, SRE practices, platform engineering, CI/CD, infrastructure automation, and how teams should think about reliability and security as things keep changing, this one should land.

Guest Mazharul Islam (DevOps with Maz) UK-based DevOps Engineer. Posts a lot of hands-on content around cloud, DevOps fundamentals, and leveling up as an engineer.

Links (Maz) YouTube: https://m.youtube.com/@devopswithmaz LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mazharul419

Topics we covered WHY behind DevOps, and why “tools” is the smallest part of it DevOps fundamentals vs tool-chasing Upskilling strategies for DevOps Engineers and SREs How to keep learning cloud and automation without drowning What strong teams measure and what “good” actually looks like (delivery, reliability, feedback loops) Agentic AI, AI agents in operations, and the next era of DevOps MCPs, automation guardrails, and safe ways to scale change How companies can “level up” their engineering org without turning it into chaos

We also discussed the previous episode of Ship It Weekly - GitHub Runner Pricing Pause, Terraform Cloud Limits, and AI in CI

https://www.tellerstech.com/ship-it-weekly/github-runner-pricing-pause-terraform-cloud-limits-and-ai-in-ci/

Book Maz recommended The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, and Security in Technology Organizations (Paperback, Oct 6, 2016) Gene Kim, Jez Humble, Patrick Debois, John Willis

About Ship It Weekly (format) Ship It Weekly is for people running infrastructure and owning reliability. Most episodes are quick weekly news recaps for DevOps, SRE, and platform engineering. In between those weekly drops, I’ll publish interview episodes like this one.

Subscribe / help the show If you want the weekly DevOps news recaps plus these interviews, hit follow or subscribe in your podcast app. And if you’re feeling generous, leave a rating or review and share this episode with a coworker (especially your on-call buddy). That stuff genuinely helps the show get discovered.

This week on Ship It Weekly, Brian looks at how the “platform tax” is showing up everywhere: pricing model shifts, CI dependencies, and new security boundaries thanks to AI agents.

We start with GitHub Actions. GitHub announced a new “cloud platform” charge for self-hosted runners in private/internal repos… then hit pause after backlash. Hosted runner price reductions for 2026 are still planned. We also got the perfect timing joke: a GitHub incident the same week.

Next up is HashiCorp. Legacy HCP Terraform (Terraform Cloud) Free is reaching end-of-life in 2026, with orgs moving to the newer Free tier capped at 500 managed resources. If you’re running real infrastructure, this is a good moment to audit what you’re actually managing and decide whether you’re cleaning up, paying, or planning a migration.

Then we talk PromptPwnd: why stuffing untrusted PR/issue text into AI agent prompts (inside CI) can turn into a supply chain/security problem. The short version: treat AI inputs like hostile user input, keep tokens/permissions minimal, and don’t let agents “run with scissors.”

We also cover the Home Depot report about long-lived access exposure as a reminder that secrets hygiene, blast radius, and detection still matter more than the shiny tools.

In the lightning round: CDKTF is sunset/archived, Bitbucket is cleaning up free unused workspaces, and SourceHut is proposing pricing changes. We wrap with a human note on “platform whiplash” and why a simple watchlist beats carrying all this stuff in your head.

Links from this episode

GitHub Actions pricing + pause https://runs-on.com/blog/github-self-hosted-runner-fee-2026/ https://x.com/github/status/2001372894882918548 https://www.githubstatus.com/incidents/x696x0g4t85l

HashiCorp / Terraform Cloud free plan changes https://github.com/hashicorp/terraform-cdk?tab=readme-ov-file#sunset-notice https://www.reddit.com/r/Terraform/s/slYm77wzYr

PromptPwnd / AI agents in CI https://www.aikido.dev/blog/promptpwnd-github-actions-ai-agents

Home Depot access exposure report https://techcrunch.com/2025/12/12/home-depot-exposed-access-to-internal-systems-for-a-year-says-researcher/

Bitbucket cleanup https://community.atlassian.com/forums/Bitbucket-articles/Bitbucket-cleanup-of-free-unused-workspaces-what-you-need-to/ba-p/3144063

SourceHut pricing proposal https://sourcehut.org/blog/2025-12-01-proposed-pricing-changes/

In this episode of Ship It Weekly, Brian powers through a cold and digs into a very “infra grown-up” week in DevOps.

First up, IBM is buying Confluent for $11B. We talk about what that means if you’re on Confluent Cloud today, still running your own Kafka, or trying to choose between Confluent, MSK, and DIY. It’s part of a bigger pattern after IBM’s HashiCorp deal, and it has real implications for vendor concentration and “plan B” strategies.

Then we shift to React2Shell, a 10.0 RCE in React Server Components that’s already being exploited in the wild. Even if you never touch React, if you run platforms or Kubernetes for teams using Next.js or RSC, you’re on the hook for patching windows, WAF rules, and blast-radius thinking.

We also look at Netflix’s write-up on consolidating relational databases onto Aurora PostgreSQL, with big performance gains and cost savings. It’s a good excuse to step back and ask whether your own Postgres fleet still makes sense at the scale you’re at now.

In the lightning round, we hit OpenTofu 1.11’s new language features, practical Terraform “tips from the trenches,” Ghostty becoming a non-profit project, and two spec-driven dev tools (Spec Kit and OpenSpec) that show what sane AI-assisted development might look like.

For the human side, we close with “Your Brain on Incidents” and what high-stress outages actually do to people, plus a few concrete ideas for making on-call less brutal.

If you’re on a platform team, own SLOs, or you’re the person people ping when “something is wrong with prod,” this one should give you a mix of immediate to-dos and longer-term questions for your roadmap.

Links:

IBM + Confluent https://www.confluent.io/blog/ibm-to-acquire-confluent/ https://newsroom.ibm.com/2025-12-08-ibm-to-acquire-confluent-to-create-smart-data-platform-for-enterprise-generative-ai

React2Shell (CVE-2025-55182) https://react.dev/blog/2025/12/03/critical-security-vulnerability-in-react-server-components

Netflix on Aurora PostgreSQL https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/database/netflix-consolidates-relational-database-infrastructure-on-amazon-aurora-achieving-up-to-75-improved-performance/

Tools & tips https://opentofu.org/blog/opentofu-1-11-0/ https://rosesecurity.dev/2025/12/04/terraform-tips-and-tricks.html https://mitchellh.com/writing/ghostty-non-profit https://github.com/github/spec-kit https://github.com/Fission-AI/OpenSpec

Human side https://uptimelabs.io/your-brain-on-incidents/