DevOps’ish

Cloud Native, DevOps, Open Source, AI, tech industry news, culture, and the ‘ish between. A newsletter by Chris Short.

Subscribe to DevOps'ish

No spam, ever. Unsubscribe anytime.

DevOps'ish 316: ClickHouse Eats Observability, the Father of the Internet Bows Out, Podman Breaks Things, and More

Designing IaC Interfaces That Work for Humans, AI Agents, and Whatever Comes Next (SPONSOR) AI agents are changing who, or what, uses your Terraform modules. Join Jinger Meilani, Senior DevOps Engineer at MNTN, to learn how to design reusable, self-service IaC interfaces that reduce misuse and work for humans, AI agents, and whatever comes next. Kepler, re-architected: Improved power accuracy and a community call to action! (8 minute read) The CNCF’s Kubernetes power-monitoring project got a full rewrite. The new architecture drops eBPF, sheds a pile of required privileges, and adds dynamic hardware discovery so the energy numbers actually mean something across mixed fleets. The team is also asking for help validating accuracy, so if you care about sustainability metrics, consider this your invitation. Akrites: The Latest Attempt to Protect Open-Source From AI Attacks Has Arrived (7 minute read) The Linux Foundation stood up Akrites, a single coordination point for finding and fixing open source vulnerabilities before attackers get there first. Jim Zemlin’s framing is bleak and accurate: the mean time to exploit is now measured in negative days. Whether another initiative moves the needle or just adds a logo to the pile is the open question. ...

July 5, 2026 · 5 min · Chris Short

DevOps'ish 315: Sub-Nanometer Chips, Supply Chain Whiplash, and the Database Nobody Could Kill, and More

We helped build Docker. Now we’re building the engineer who maintains it. (SPONSOR) Sam was Docker’s first hire. Andrea wrote Docker’s first commit. We spent a decade watching teams drown in CI maintenance. Mendral is what we wished we’d had. Three agents in your CI: Security reviews dep PRs, Reliability fixes flaky tests, Performance cuts pipeline time. Designing IaC Interfaces That Work for Humans, AI Agents, and Whatever Comes Next (SPONSOR) AI agents are changing who, or what, uses your Terraform modules. Join Jinger Meilani, Senior DevOps Engineer at MNTN, to learn how to design reusable, self-service IaC interfaces that reduce misuse and work for humans, AI agents, and whatever comes next. Klue Supply Chain Incident and LastPass Response (4 minute read) An unauthorized actor snagged OAuth tokens from Klue, a market intelligence platform, and used them to access LastPass customer contact and CRM data stored in Salesforce. LastPass says vaults and core infrastructure are unaffected, but this is another clean example of why your vendor’s vendor is still your problem. ...

June 28, 2026 · 5 min · Chris Short

DevOps'ish 314: GitHub Ignored the Reports, Norway Didn't, AI Needs More Discipline, and More

A security reviewer on every PR that touches a dependency. (SPONSOR) Most PR reviewers read the diff in your repo. Nobody pulls the source of the dep that just got added or bumped. That’s where supply chain attacks live: a new postinstall script, a network call to a fresh domain, an obfuscated blob. Mendral runs on every PR that touches dependencies as a security-minded reviewer. It checks how recently the version was published, reads the dep’s actual code diff, and flags suspicious patterns before merge. How I’m Solving Local Inference - Running powerful models locally across two laptops using LM Studio’s LM Link, trading token costs for portability between a MacBook Air and Framework 13. Worth a look if you’re tired of the meter running or have a lightweight daily driver and a beefier box somewhere. GitHub dismissed security reports on flaws now exploited by supply-chain worm, researchers say - Deep Specter documented two vulnerability reports GitHub rejected, both of which are now being actively exploited by the Shai-Hulud supply-chain worm, which has already compromised hundreds of packages and developer accounts across major code repositories. ...

June 21, 2026 · 3 min · Chris Short

DevOps'ish 313: Export Controlled, AUR Torched, Lawyers Disqualified, and more

The Claude Fable launch turned into a complete debacle this week and is a cautionary tale of the times we’re in. It’s also one of the most botched product releases we’ve witnessed in quite some time. On Tuesday, June 9th, Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5 were released to every paying customer for a limited time, before it was slated to move to API billing on June 22nd. Anthropic implemented several safeguards (classifiers) to route sensitive topics such as cybersecurity, chemistry, and biology queries to older models. There were additional checks in place that hindered AI researchers and safety folks from doing their work by invisibly doing the same thing. Anthropic walked back the invisible safety checks, saying, “We made the wrong trade-off and we apologize for not getting the balance right.” On Thursday, Microsoft restricted employees from using the latest Claude models due to a 30-day retention policy that Anthropic implemented as yet another safety feature. I have no doubt numerous other organizations would do the same. ...

June 14, 2026 · 8 min · Chris Short

DevOps'ish 312: Nobody won the token race, rsync outrage, dev goes scorched earth on vibe coders, and more

Most teams quarantine flaky tests. We fix them. A flake fails, someone hits retry, it passes, you merge. The bug doesn’t go away. Mendral runs in your CI, reproduces the flake in a sandbox, finds the actual race or timing bug, and opens the fix PR. No quarantines, no skip annotations, no ignore list growing month over month. SPONSORED Eliminating Kubernetes Image Signature Replication - The Kubernetes project tore out a resource-intensive signature replication pipeline and replaced it with a simple routing approach that points all signature requests to a single canonical region. Less infra, same trust chain. From Kubernetes Dashboard to Headlamp: Understanding the Transition - The Kubernetes Dashboard is archived. Headlamp is the successor, and this post maps familiar workflows to the new tool while walking through multi-cluster visibility, application-centric views, and the plugin extension model. Multiple Red Hat Cloud Services npm Packages Compromised to Deploy Credential-Stealing Malware - Attackers compromised the CI/CD pipeline behind the @redhat-cloud-services npm namespace and poisoned over 30 packages with malware that runs automatically on npm install. It hoovers up GitHub tokens, cloud credentials, Kubernetes tokens, SSH keys, and more – then disguises its exfil traffic as calls to api.anthropic.com to blend into org logs. If you run anything from that scope, audit your environments now. ...

June 7, 2026 · 6 min · Chris Short