In this episode of Adventures in DevOps, we dive into the world of FinOps, a concept that aims to apply the DevOps mindset to financial accountability. Yasmin Rajabi, Chief Strategy Officer at CloudBolt, joins us to demystify, as we acknowledge the critical challenge of bringing together financial accountability and engineering teams who often are not paying attention to the business.

The discussion further explores the practicalities of FinOps in the context of cloud spending and Kubernetes. Yasmin highlights that a significant amount of waste in organizations comes from simply not turning off unused systems and not right-sizing resources. She explains how tools like Horizontal Pod Autoscaler (HPA) and Vertical Pod Autoscaler (VPA) can help, but also points out the complexities of optimizing across horizontal and vertical scaling behaviors. The conversation touches on "shame back reporting" as a way to provide visibility into costs for engineering teams, although the conversation emphasizes that providing tooling and insights is more effective than simply telling developers to change configurations.

The episode also delves into the evolving mindset around cloud costs, especially with the rise of AI and machine learning workloads. While historically engineering salaries eclipsed cloud spending, the increasing hardware requirements for ML and data workloads are making cost optimization a more pressing concern. Spending-conscious teams are increasingly asking about GPU optimization, even if AI/ML teams are still largely focused on limitless spending to drive unjustified "innovation". The conclude by discussing the challenges of on-premise versus cloud deployments and the importance of addressing "day two problems" regardless of the infrastructure choice.

Picks

• Warren - Lions and Dolphins cannot make babies
• Aimee - The Equip Protein Powder and Protein Bar
• Yasmin - Bone Broth drink by 1990 Snacks

Get ready for a lively debate on this episode of Adventures in DevOps. We're joined by Brian Pontarelli, founder of FusionAuth and CleanSpeak. Warren and Brian face off by diving into the controversial topic of multitenant versus single-tenant architecture. Expert co-host Aimee Knight joins to moderate the discussion. Ever wondered how someone becomes an "auth expert"? Warren spills the beans on his journey, explaining it's less about a direct path and more about figuring out what it means for yourself. Brian chimes in with his own "random chance" story, revealing how they fell into it after their forum-based product didn't pan out.

Aimee confesses her "alarm bells" start ringing whenever multitenant architecture is mentioned, jokingly demanding "details" and admitting her preference for more separation when it comes to reliability. Brian makes a compelling case for his company's chosen path, explaining how their high-performance, downloadable single-tenant profanity filter, CleanSpeak, handles billions of chat messages a month with extreme low latency. This architectural choice became a competitive advantage, attracting companies that couldn't use cloud-based multitenant competitors due to their need to run solutions in their own data centers.

We critique cloud providers' tendency to push users towards their most profitable services, citing AWS Cognito as an example of a cost-effective solution for small-scale use that becomes cost-prohibitive with scaling and feature enablement. The challenges of integrating with Cognito, including its reliance on numerous other AWS services and the need for custom Lambda functions for configuration, are also a point of contention. The conversation extends to the frustrations of managing upgrades and breaking changes in both multitenant and single-tenant systems and the inherent difficulties of ensuring compatibility across different software versions and integrations. The episode concludes with a humorous take on the current state and perceived limitations of AI in software development, particularly concerning security.

Picks

• Warren - Scarpa Hiking shoes - Planet Mojito Suade
• Aimee - Peloton Tread
• Brian - Searchcraft and Fight or Flight

Episode Sponsor: PagerDuty - Checkout the features in their official feature release: https://fnf.dev/4dYQ7gL

This episode dives into a fundamental question facing the DevOps world: Did Kubernetes truly win the infrastructure race because it was the best technology, or were there other, perhaps less obvious, factors at play? Omer Hamerman joins Will and Warren to take a hard look at it. Despite the rise of serverless solutions promising to abstract away infrastructure management, Omer shares that Kubernetes has seen a surge in adoption, with potentially 70-75% of corporations now using or migrating to it. We explore the theory that human nature's preference for incremental "step changes" (Kaizen) over disruptive "giant leaps" (Kaikaku) might explain why a solution perceived by some as "worse" or more complex has gained such widespread traction.

The discussion unpacks the undeniable strengths of Kubernetes, including its "thriving community", its remarkable extensibility through APIs, and how it inadvertently created "job security" for engineers who "nerd out" on its intricacies. We also challenge the narrative by examining why serverless options like AWS Fargate could often be a more efficient and less burdensome choice for many organizations, especially those not requiring deep control or specialized hardware like GPUs. The conversation highlights that the perceived "need" for Kubernetes' emerges often from something other than technical superiority.

Finally, we consider the disruptive influence of AI and "vibe coding" on this landscape, how could we not? As LLMs are adopted to "accelerate development", they tend to favor serverless deployment models, implicitly suggesting that for rapid product creation, Kubernetes might not be the optimal fit. This shift raises crucial questions about the trade-offs between development speed and code quality, the evolving role of software engineers towards code review, and the long-term maintainability of AI-generated code. We close by pondering the broader societal and environmental implications of these technological shifts, including AI's massive energy consumption and the ongoing debate about centralizing versus decentralizing infrastructure for efficiency.

Links:​

• Comparison: Linux versus E. coli

Picks​

• Warren - Surveys are great, and also fill in the Podcast Survey
• Will - Katana.network
• Omer - Mobland and JJ (Jujutsu)

In this episode, Aimee Knight, an expert in Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) whose experience hails from Paramount and NPM, joins the podcast to discuss her journey into SRE, the challenges she faced, and the strategies she employed to succeed. Aimee shares her transition from a non-traditional background in JavaScript development to SRE, highlighting the importance of understanding both the programming and infrastructure sides of engineering. She also delves into the complexities of SRE at different scales, the role of playbooks in incident management, and the balance between speed and quality in software development.

Aimee discusses the impact of AI and machine learning on SRE, emphasizing the need for responsible use of these tools. She touches on the importance of understanding business needs and how it affects decision-making in SRE roles. The conversation also covers the trade-offs in system design, the challenges of scaling applications, and the importance of resilience in distributed systems. Aimee provides valuable insights into the pros and cons of a career in SRE, including the importance of self-care and the satisfaction of mentoring others.

The episode concludes with us discussing some of the hard problems such as the on-call burden for large teams, and the technical expertise an org needs to maintain higher complexity systems. Is the average tenure in tech decreasing, we discuss it and do a deep dive on the consequences in the SRE world.

Picks​

• The Adventures In DevOps: Survey
• Warren's Technical Blog
• Warren: The Fifth Discipline by Peter Senge
• Aimee: Sleep Token (Band) - Caramel, Granite
• Will: The Bear Grylls Celebrity Hunt on Netflix
• Jillian: Horizon Zero Dawn Video Game

In this episode, we delve into the concept of MCP (Machine Control Protocol) servers and their role in enabling agent interactions. Gil Feig, the co-founder and CTO of Merge, shares insights on how MCP servers facilitate efficient and secure integration between various services and APIs.

The discussion covers the benefits and challenges of using MCP servers, including their stateful nature, security considerations, and the importance of understanding real-world use cases. Gil emphasizes the need for thorough testing and evaluation to ensure that MCP servers effectively meet user needs.

Additionally, we explore the implications of MCP servers on data security, scaling, and the evolving landscape of API interactions. Warren chimes in with experiences integrating AI with Auth. Will stuns us with some nuclear fission history. And finally, we also touch on the balance between short-term innovation and long-term stability in technology, reflecting on how different generations approach problem-solving and knowledge sharing.

Picks​:

• The Adventures In DevOps: Survey
• Warren: The Magicians by Lev Grossman
• Gil: Constant Escapement in Watchmaking
• Will: Dungeon Crawler Carl & Atmos Clock

Warren talks with Nathan Goulding, SVP of Engineering at Vultr, about what it actually takes to run a high-performance cloud platform. They cover everything from global game server latency and hybrid models to bare metal provisioning and the power/cooling constraints that come with modern GPU clusters.

The discussion gets into real-world deployment challenges like scaling across 32 data centers, edge use cases that actually matter, and how to design systems for location-sensitive customers—whether that’s due to regulation or performance. Additionally, there's talk about where the hyperscalers have overcomplicated pricing and where simplicity in a flatter pricing model and optimized defaults are better for everyone.

There’s a section on nuclear energy (yes, really), including SMRs, power procurement, and what it means to keep scaling compute with limited resources. If you're wondering whether your app actually needs high-performance compute or just better visibility into your costs, this is the episode.

Picks​

• The Adventures In DevOps: Survey
• Warren: Jetlag: The Game
• Nathan: Money Heist (La Casa de Papel)

Inna Tokarev Sela, CEO and founder of Illumex, joins the crew to break down what it really means to make your data “AI-ready.” This isn’t just about clean tables—it’s about semantic fabric, business ontologies, and grounding agents in your company's context to prevent the dreaded LLM hallucination. We dive into how modern enterprises just cannot build a single source of truth, not matter how hard they try. All the while knowing that it's required to build effected agents utilizing the available knowledge graphs and.

The conversation unpacks democratizing data access and avoiding analytics anarchy. Inna explains how automation and graph modeling are used to extract semantic meaning from disconnected data stores, and how to resolve conflicting definitions. And yes, Warren finally coughs up what's so wrong with most dashboards.

Lastly, we quickly get to the core philosophical questions of agentic systems and AGI, including why intuition is the real differentiator between humans and machines. Plus: storage cost regrets, spiritual journeys disguised as inference pipelines, and a very healthy fear of subscription-based sleep wearables.

Picks​

• The Adventures In DevOps: Survey
• Warren: The Non-Computability of Intuition
• Will: The Arc Browser
• Inna: Healthy GenAI skepticism

Sylvain Kalache, Head of Developer Relations at Rootly joins us to explore the new frontier of incident response powered by large language models. We dive into the evolution of DevRel and how we meet the new challenges impacting our systems.

We explore Sylvain's origin story in self-healing systems, dating back to his SlideShare and LinkedIn days. From ingesting logs via Fluentd to building early ML-driven RCA tools, he shares a vision of self-healing infrastructure that targets root causes rather than just restarting boxes. Plus, we trace the historical arc of deterministic and non-deterministic tools.

The conversation shifts toward real-world applications, where we're combining logs, metrics, transcripts, and postmortems to give SREs superpowers. We get tactical on integrating LLMs, why fine-tuning isn't always worth it, and how the Model Context Protocol (MCP) could be the USB of AI ops, but how it is still insecure. We wrap by facing the harsh reality of "incident vibing" in a world increasingly built by prompts, not people—and how to prepare for it.Picks​

• Warren: There is no AI Revolution
• Sylvain: Incident Vibing and Rootly Labs SRE event on April 24th

This week, Paul Marston from Ankr joins the crew to unpack the madness that is modern blockchain infrastructure. From his wild career transition out of financial services into 24/7 node ops for Web3, Paul shares the brutal truth about uptime expectations, decentralization challenges, and why hard forks are more like enterprise schema upgrades with a community twist. If you’ve ever wondered why managing a blockchain node is like owning a temperamental pet server, this one’s for you.

The team goes deep on the nitty-gritty of load balancing across dozens of chains, explaining why routing traffic to the “wrong” archive node could ruin your day—and how Ankr’s custom load balancer is basically magic for JSON-RPC calls. Warren tosses out wild scenarios about encrypted data smuggling via blockchain, while Will confesses his angry typing habit (yes, it’s back). The discussion gets even more fun with debates on innovation vs. rigor, Web2's forgotten best practices, and why testing in prod might not be such a dirty word after all.

But don’t think it’s all crypto and code. Paul shares battle-won wisdom from running over 100 chains across bare metal, giving us a peek at the operational sophistication and automation involved. From Terraform templates to Docker configs, he walks through the process of onboarding new chains and tuning for performance. The episode also touches on emerging risks like data exfiltration via public blockchains, and why AI (used wisely) might just be the sidekick DevOps always needed.

And of course memes, we talk a bit about this one: Tree Swing Product Development

Picks​

• Warren: Dvorak Keyboard Setup and Logitech K295
• Will: Quirky Record Player from Miniot
• Paul: Super Whisper - Voice Transcription Tool

In this episode, Will and Warren welcome Adriana Villela — CNCF ambassador, Dynatrace advocate, and host of the Geeking Out podcast — for a wide-ranging conversation on observability in CI/CD pipelines. Adriana shares her journey from “On Call Me Maybe” to her own podcast, her work with OpenTelemetry, and why observability isn’t just for SREs anymore.

The crew digs into how telemetry should be integrated across the software development lifecycle — from development to QA to production — and what that really looks like in modern teams. Adriana drops knowledge on CI/CD failures, distributed traces, and even how to bring observability to other parts of the business like recruiting and onboarding. She also explains how she got involved in the OpenTelemetry end-user SIG and what’s next for the observability movement.

Things get persona as we trade war stories about SVN, terrible version control systems, reusable grocery bags, and the ethics of AI log parsers. Adriana closes with a powerful take: observability is a team sport, and the better we play it, the more effective — and environmentally conscious — our systems can become.Picks​

• Warren: Adventures In DevOps survey - How can we make it better for you?
• Adriana: Bouldering — she recommends it both as a physical activity and a therapeutic mental reset, especially when traveling
• Jillian: Expeditionary Force
• Will: Iron Neck and Purpose & Prophet