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/

In this episode of Ship It Weekly, Brian looks at re:Invent through a platform/SRE lens and pulls out the updates that actually change how you design and run systems.

We talk about regional NAT Gateways and Route 53 Global Resolver on the networking side, ECS Express Mode and EKS Capabilities as new paved roads for app teams, S3 Vectors GA and 50 TB S3 objects for AI and data lakes, Aurora PostgreSQL dynamic data masking, CodeCommit’s return to full GA, and IAM Policy Autopilot for AI-assisted IAM policies. This was recorded mid–re:Invent, so consider it a “what matters so far” pass, not a full recap.

Outside AWS, we get into Google’s 130,000-node GKE cluster and what actually applies if you’re running normal-sized clusters, plus the “It’s time to kill staging” argument and what responsible testing in production looks like with feature flags, progressive delivery, and solid observability.

In the lightning round, we hit Zachary Loeber’s Terraform MCP server and terraform-ingest (letting AI tools speak your real Terraform modules), Runs-On’s EC2 instance rankings so you stop picking instance types by vibes, and Airbnb’s adaptive traffic management for their key-value store. We close with Nolan Lawson’s “The fate of small open source” and what it means when your platform quietly depends on one-maintainer libraries.

Links from this episode:

AWS highlights:

https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2025/11/aws-nat-gateway-regional-availability

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/introducing-amazon-route-53-global-resolver-for-secure-anycast-dns-resolution-preview

https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2025/11/announcing-amazon-ecs-express-mode

https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2025/12/amazon-s3-vectors-generally-available/

Other topics:

https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/containers-kubernetes/how-we-built-a-130000-node-gke-cluster

https://thenewstack.io/its-time-to-kill-staging-the-case-for-testing-in-production/

https://blog.zacharyloeber.com/article/terraform-custom-module-mcp-server/

https://go.runs-on.com/instances/ranking

https://medium.com/airbnb-engineering/from-static-rate-limiting-to-adaptive-traffic-management-in-airbnbs-key-value-store-29362764e5c2

https://nolanlawson.com/2025/11/16/the-fate-of-small-open-source/

In this episode of Ship It Weekly, Brian digs into what’s new for people actually running infra: Kubernetes config, EKS control planes and networking, and GitHub’s latest CI/CD and Copilot updates.

We start with Kubernetes’ new configuration good practices post and how to turn it into a checklist to clean up Helm/Kustomize and kill off “hotfix from my laptop” manifests.

Then we hit AWS: EKS Provisioned Control Plane to size control plane capacity for big or noisy clusters, plus new network observability so you can see who’s talking to what across clusters and AZs instead of guessing from node metrics.

On the GitHub side, Actions OIDC tokens now include a check_run_id for tighter access control, and Copilot adds instructions files and custom agents so you can encode platform and security expectations directly into reviews and workflows.

In the lightning round, we touch on Terrascan being archived, Microsoft’s write-up of a 15.72 Tbps Aisuru DDoS attack against Azure, and AWS flat-rate CloudFront plans that bundle CDN and security into more predictable pricing.

We close with Lorin Hochstein’s “Two thought experiments” and what it looks like to write incident reports as if an AI (and your future teammates) will rely on them to debug the next outage.

If run Kubernetes in prod this one should give you a few concrete ideas for your roadmap.

Links from episode

https://kubernetes.io/blog/2025/11/25/configuration-good-practices/

https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2025/11/amazon-eks-provisioned-control-plane/

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/monitor-network-performance-and-traffic-across-your-eks-clusters-with-container-network-observability/

https://github.blog/changelog/2025-11-13-github-actions-oidc-token-claims-now-include-check_run_id/

https://github.blog/ai-and-ml/unlocking-the-full-power-of-copilot-code-review-master-your-instructions-files/

https://docs.github.com/en/copilot/how-tos/use-copilot-agents/coding-agent/create-custom-agents

Lightning Round

https://github.com/tenable/terrascan

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/microsoft/microsoft-aisuru-botnet-used-500-000-ips-in-15-tbps-azure-ddos-attack/

https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2025/11/aws-flat-rate-pricing-plans/

https://sreweekly.com/sre-weekly-issue-498/ (Lorin's Article)

In this episode of Ship It Weekly, Brian digs into 3 big themes for anyone running Kubernetes or building internal platforms.

First, Kubernetes is officially retiring Ingress NGINX and moving it into best-effort maintenance until March 2026. We talk about what that actually means if you’re still using it and how to think about choosing and rolling out a replacement ingress.

Second, we look at how CNCF is defining platform engineering and what “platform as a product” looks like in practice, plus some hard-earned lessons from running Kubernetes in production.

Third, we talk about AI as a first-class workload on Kubernetes. CNCF’s new Certified Kubernetes AI Conformance Program aims to standardize how AI runs on K8s, and recent writing on SRE in the age of AI looks at what reliability means when systems learn and drift.

In the lightning round, we hit good reads on database migrations, Postgres upgrades, and a distributed priority queue on Kafka. We wrap with the human side of incidents: fixation during incident response and using incidents as landmarks for the tradeoffs you’ve been making over time.

If you’re on a platform team, responsible for SLOs, or the person people ping when “Kubernetes is weird,” this one should give you concrete questions to take back to your roadmap and runbooks.

Links from this episode

https://kubernetes.io/blog/2025/11/11/ingress-nginx-retirement/

https://www.haproxy.com/blog/ingress-nginx-is-retiring

https://www.cncf.io/blog/2025/11/19/what-is-platform-engineering/

https://www.cncf.io/announcements/2025/11/11/cncf-launches-certified-kubernetes-ai-conformance-program-to-standardize-ai-workloads-on-kubernetes/

https://devops.com/sre-in-the-age-of-ai-what-reliability-looks-like-when-systems-learn/

Lightning round

https://www.cncf.io/blog/2025/11/18/top-5-hard-earned-lessons-from-the-experts-on-managing-kubernetes/

https://www.tines.com/blog/zero-downtime-database-migrations-lessons-from-moving-a-live-production

https://palark.com/blog/postgresql-upgrade-no-data-loss-downtime/

https://klaviyo.tech/building-a-distributed-priority-queue-in-kafka-1b2d8063649e

https://sreweekly.com/sre-weekly-issue-497/

https://ferd.ca/ongoing-tradeoffs-and-incidents-as-landmarks.html

In this special kickoff episode of Ship It Weekly, Brian walks through three major outages from the last few weeks and what they actually mean for DevOps, SRE, and platform teams.

Instead of just reading status pages, we look at how each incident exposes assumptions in our own architectures and runbooks:

Topics in this episode:

• Cloudflare’s global outage and what happens when your CDN/WAF becomes a single point of failure

• The AWS us-east-1 incident and why “multi-AZ in one region” isn’t a full disaster recovery strategy

• GitHub’s Git operations / Codespaces outage and how fragile our CI/CD and GitOps flows can be

• Practical questions to ask about your own setup: CDN bypass, cross-region readiness, backups for Git and CI

This episode is more of a themed “special” to kick things off.

Going forward, most episodes will follow a lighter news format: a couple of main stories from the week in DevOps/SRE/platform engineering, a quick tools and releases segment, and one culture/on-call or burnout topic. Specials like this will pop up when there’s a big incident or theme worth unpacking.

If you’re the person people DM when production is acting weird, or you’re responsible for the platform everyone ships on, this one’s for you.

Links from this episode

Cloudflare outage – November 18, 2025

https://blog.cloudflare.com/18-november-2025-outage/

https://www.thousandeyes.com/blog/cloudflare-outage-analysis-november-18-2025

AWS us-east-1 outage – October 2025

https://aws.amazon.com/message/101925/

https://www.thousandeyes.com/blog/aws-outage-analysis-october-20-2025

GitHub outage – November 18, 2025

https://us.githubstatus.com/incidents/f3f7sg2d1m20

https://currently.att.yahoo.com/att/github-down-now-not-just-211700617.html