DevOps &amp; CI/CD

25 JunUpdated 03 Oct 202612 min

What a service mesh adds between services: mutual TLS, retries and timeouts, weighted canary routing and uniform telemetry, provided by sidecars or Istio ambient mode, and whether the operational cost is worth it.

Service Mesh: When and Why

Advanced

Sidecar proxies for traffic management, mTLS, observability, and resilience — what a service mesh actually buys you, and when the operational cost is worth it.

A disciplined Helm setup: a chart with small templates and layered values per environment, dependencies through umbrella charts, deployed by GitOps instead of running helm by hand, with atomic upgrades that roll back on failure.

Helm Charts: Packaging K8s Applications

23 JunUpdated 24 Sep 202612 min

Kubernetes's package manager — chart structure, values.yaml, Go templates, dependencies, and release management (install, upgrade, rollback) for real deployments.

A trustworthy container registry: CI pushes immutable tags, images are signed and scanned for vulnerabilities, geo-replication speeds up pulls, retention rules remove unused layers, and clusters verify signatures before running.

Container Registry Best Practices

21 JunUpdated 29 Sep 202611 min

Store, scan, and distribute container images — immutable tags, vulnerability scanning policies, geo-replication, and retention rules that keep a registry trustworthy.

Alerting on symptoms: SLO burn-rate rules over multiple windows separate a fast burn worth paging from a slow burn worth a ticket, alerts are grouped and inhibited, routed by severity, and each has an owner and a runbook.

Alerting: Signal vs Noise

19 JunUpdated 27 Sep 202612 min

Actionable alerts, on-call rotations, and incident response — alert rules, severity, routing, and the fatigue-prevention discipline that keeps on-call sane.

Production monitoring built on the four golden signals, latency, traffic, errors and saturation, turned into SLIs and SLOs with an error budget, so alerts fire on user impact rather than CPU, backed by structured logs and traces.

Production Monitoring: The Four Golden Signals and the SLO Stack

28 AprUpdated 17 Aug 202612 min

Latency, traffic, errors, and saturation — the four golden signals — plus SLIs, SLOs, error budgets, and the alerting philosophy that prevents alert fatigue.

26 AprUpdated 08 Oct 202611 min

Trunk-based development: short-lived branches merge into main within a day behind branch protection, unfinished work hides behind feature flags, hotfixes go to main and are cherry-picked to a release, compared with long-lived GitFlow branches.

Branching Strategies: Trunk-Based Development vs GitFlow in 2026

Foundational

Trunk-based development, feature flags, short-lived branches, GitFlow trade-offs, and why high-performing teams converge on committing to main.

A CI/CD pipeline built for fast feedback: commits to trunk run sharded parallel tests and quality gates, flaky tests are quarantined, feature flags decouple deploy from release, and DORA metrics track lead time and failure rate.

CI/CD Pipeline Design: Fast Feedback, Quality Gates, and DORA Metrics

24 AprUpdated 25 Sep 202613 min

Trunk-based development, parallel testing, deployment gates, feature flags, and designing pipelines that keep deployment frequency high and failure rate low.

Kubernetes Deployments: Rolling Updates, Resource Limits, and HPA

22 AprUpdated 10 Oct 202616 min

Deployment strategies, readiness and liveness probes, resource requests and limits, Horizontal Pod Autoscaler, and PodDisruptionBudgets for zero-downtime releases.

A production Docker image: a multi-stage build compiles in an SDK stage and copies only output to a slim runtime stage pinned by digest, running as a non-root user with a read-only filesystem and health check, about 80 percent smaller.

Docker for Production: Multi-Stage Builds, Security, and Compose

20 AprUpdated 14 Oct 202614 min

Multi-stage builds that cut image size by 80%, non-root users, read-only filesystems, health checks, and Compose patterns for local development parity.

A GitHub Actions pipeline: a push or pull request triggers a matrix build calling a shared reusable workflow with pinned actions and timeouts, then deploys through a protected environment using OIDC instead of stored cloud secrets.

GitHub Actions in Production: Workflows, OIDC, and Reusable Patterns

18 AprUpdated 24 Sep 202615 min

Triggers, matrix builds, reusable workflows, composite actions, OIDC cloud authentication, and the patterns that keep CI pipelines fast and secure.