Devops

Application code that breaks can be rolled back in seconds. A migration that breaks has already changed your data. Migrations deserve more caution than any other code in your pipeline — and usually get less.

Retries, timeouts, and health checks are supposed to make systems resilient. Configured naively, they turn a recoverable blip into a self-sustaining outage. The resilience code becomes the incident.

Staging exists to catch problems before production. Most staging environments catch the wrong problems and miss the real ones, because they differ from production in exactly the ways that matter.

When you give an AI agent access to your tools, you've created a privileged insider. The threat model is different from a compromised service — because the agent acts non-deterministically, at scale, on your behalf.

Traces, metrics, and logs were designed for deterministic systems. When an agent makes 40 tool calls across three services to complete a task, your existing observability stack tells you almost nothing useful.

IAM roles, network policies, secrets rotation schedules — all designed for humans or static services. AI agents are neither. They're dynamic, non-deterministic actors with legitimate credentials, and your current policy model doesn't account for them.

Your AWS bill is $X. You have no idea which features cost what. Here's the minimum-viable cost attribution that any small team can run.

A playbook is only useful if a stressed engineer can follow it half-asleep. Here's the structure that survives real incidents.

Multi-repo is overhead masquerading as separation of concerns. For teams under 50, monorepo is almost always right.

Datadog at series A is fine. Datadog at seed is malpractice. Here's a stack that gets you 80% of the value for 1% of the cost.

On-call is a tax on your team. Done badly, it's the reason senior engineers quit. Here's the rotation design that actually works.

Docker solves the packaging problem. Kubernetes solves the operational problem. Here is what K8s actually adds, how its core objects work, and why rolling updates change how you think about deployments.