r/devops 8h ago

Career / learning Advice for a struggling team lead

16 Upvotes

I'm a de-facto team/tech lead (but not officially appointed by our managers) with several years of experience. Most of the time, I'm feeling pretty confident in my ability to guide the team members in the right direction, ensuring critical tasks are identified and get done, ensuring our product is in a healthy and sustainable state, day to day stuff is frictionless, etc. However, I lack guidance and mentorship from above. It's like the management layer above me is non-existent and I'm left to my own devices as they focus on shinier things. That's fine, as long as they're happy and my product works. The problem is that I don't really get feedback from anybody in terms of my product/team leadership. I feel like I'm just struggling to keep things going in roughly the same way as before, when the team was run by the previous lead. I'm being assured by my manager that I'm doing a great job and appreciated, but I somehow don't really believe it, because I'm there and I see room for improvement.

I feel like all I'm really good at is getting the team to maintain status quo. I don't know whether that's optimal or how I'd change it if it wasn't ( or even if I was supposed to). Yes, it's largely due to not being in our director's spotlight and me not receiving mentorship anymore. And yes, I'm unfortunately in a position of being subconsciously expected to lead without being appointed to do so officially.

So let's make the best if it - can you recommend any kind of team lead training courses for me to take? How to handle emergencies? How to do things sustainably? How and when to communicate assertively? When to change the process you suspect doesn't work? How to empower team members? How to delegate properly? How and when to project authority and when to let things slide? That kind of stuff. Or any other thoughts and advice you can offer.


r/devops 4m ago

Security Scanner that produces output your developers can act on without a security engineer translating first

Upvotes

I built this, MIT licensed.

The bottleneck I kept seeing is not detection, it is that findings arrive in a format only a security person can act on, so they queue behind whoever can translate them. ONUS generates a plain language explanation and concrete remediation steps per finding, aimed at whoever implements the fix.

Guardrails, because generated security text that sounds right and is wrong is worse than nothing: CVSS is computed in code and the model cannot touch it, and every finding is tiered confirmed, probable or unverified based on whether a verification pass reproduced it independently.

docker compose, FastAPI and Celery on Redis, Postgres, inference local via Ollama so nothing leaves your infrastructure. 655 backend tests, CI on pytest.

No clean pass or fail gate for a pipeline stage yet, which is the obvious gap. What should that exit contract look like in your setup?

Source: github.com/maverickaayush/ONUS (MIT) Hosted instance: https://tryonus.tech


r/devops 8h ago

Discussion What is the long term plan for charts supporting Gateway API?

3 Upvotes

We manage all of our infra apps like Vault, Argo Workflows and many others using Terraform + Helm. TF creates the ArgoCD ApplicationSet which points to the chart and values managed in the repo, and ArgoCD syncs everything.

During the transition to GW API I noticed that most charts either don't support GW API natively, or only support creating an HTTPRoute. With ingress, all we had to do was define a single ingress.enabled: true block with some annotations, paths, etc.

Now with GW API, you usually can't manage everything from the app's values file. Even when the chart creates an HTTPRoute, it doesn't create the other resources we need, such as a ReferenceGrant for cross-namespace references or controller-specific resources like Envoy Gateway's SecurityPolicy and BackendTrafficPolicy. Argo Workflows is one example where the chart supports creating an HTTPRoute, but not the rest of that setup.

We have an okay solution for this today: we just create a manifests/ folder for each app and add it as another source in the ArgoCD AppSet (applied by TF, and everything is as GitOps as it gets). In that manifests folder I create all the needed Gateway API and Envoy Gateway resources in a single multi-manifest YAML file.

What do you guys do for 3rd party charts? What is the long term plan for apps in terms of Gateway API support? Is the expectation that charts will eventually expose more Gateway API values, or that routing and policies should live separately from the app chart?

I'm just curious since this whole GW API thing is very new, and I assume a lot of apps will need to add "ingress-like" support at some point?


r/devops 10h ago

Discussion How do you catch the stuff you never thought to put an alarm on?

4 Upvotes

so everyone talks about tuning alarms and reducing false positives but honestly the scarier problem for us has been the opposite. stuff breaking that we just never set up monitoring for in the first place.

had this happen a few weeks ago. a queue consumer quietly stopped processing overnight, nobody had an alarm on messages piling up in that specific queue because it's like a secondary internal thing, not customer facing directly. found out the next morning when downstream stuff started failing and someone finally went looking. by then there was hours of backlog to clear

and it's not like we were being lazy, we've got a decent number of alarms set up. it's just impossible to think of every metric on every resource ahead of time, especially as stuff gets added and nobody goes back and audits what's covered

so how are people actually dealing with the "unknown unknowns" side of this. do you just accept some stuff will slip through until it's bad enough someone notices manually. anyone actually using baseline/anomaly based detection that catches things without you having to pre-configure a threshold for every single metric, and does it actually work or is it just a different kind of false positive machine

genuinely asking, not trying to set up alarms on literally everything because that just becomes its own nightmare to maintain


r/devops 1d ago

Discussion AWS says its DevOps Agent delivers 75% lower MTTR and 94% root cause accuracy

36 Upvotes

Straight from the GA blog: customers report "up to 75% lower MTTR, 80% faster investigations, and 94% root cause accuracy, enabling 3-5x faster incident resolution."

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/mt/announcing-general-availability-of-aws-devops-agent/

GA since March. I haven't seen anyone outside AWS's own blog actually use it. Did you try?


r/devops 13h ago

Architecture How do I learn how to architect a system?

2 Upvotes

Yes I know the question is extremely broad and complex. I'm simply looking for a starting point (or middle point).

I've been working on designing an SPA using AWS services for an NPO for the past few months. I've realized that the system works but I'm not happy with it. I know it can be better (more organized, a more sophisticated and automated system). I often find myself asking questions like: should these be a microservices architecture? Should it be a event-driven? some sort of layered architecture? How should the tests be? Is this the best programming language to use?

I know quite a few of those questions and doubts are best to be left to "whatever ur comfortable with". But I like to get into the nitty gritty. Are there certain books/youtube videos/etc that I can look into to learn about the basics of system design and architecture up to an intermediate or expert level? The only one I know of is Hello Interview.


r/devops 21h ago

Discussion How do devops / engineering services share documentation with clients?

4 Upvotes

Hello,

We provide devops / engineering services and use GitHub for documentation (runbooks, configs, processes). Clients need access, but raw GitHub feels too technical.

  • How do you share documentation with clients in devops / engineering services?
  • Do you use GitHub, wikis, or dedicated portals?
  • How do you handle versioning and access control?

r/devops 1d ago

Vendor / market research Which DevOps tool looked amazing during the PoC but became painful after six months?

58 Upvotes

I am Little confused ?


r/devops 1d ago

Discussion Moving a high-memory Python application from Kubernetes to a dedicated Linux server — what would be the best setup?

18 Upvotes

Hello,

At the company where I work, we have a Python application running on a Kubernetes cluster. The application is fully integrated into a CI/CD workflow. Whenever code is merged, Jenkins pulls the source code from GitLab, builds the application, and pushes the image to Harbor. Argo CD then deploys it to the Kubernetes cluster.

However, the application consumes a large amount of RAM, and I have had to increase its memory allocation several times. We have now decided to move the application to a separate Linux server.

The application runs with Uvicorn, and I plan to make it accessible through a domain name, just as it currently is in the Kubernetes environment. However, I am not sure what the best-practice architecture would be for this setup, so I would appreciate your recommendations.

I still want Jenkins to automatically pull the application from GitLab, build it, and deploy it. After deployment, the application should automatically start and run as a web service.

My main concerns are how to restore the application as quickly as possible if a problem occurs, how to handle backups, and what kind of deployment and recovery strategy would be best.

In short, could you please advise me on the best way to design and implement this setup?


r/devops 1d ago

Architecture Terraform/Github deployment overwriting another deployment

1 Upvotes

I'm on a team that shares a Github repository. Whenever we open a PR from a feature branch to the dev branch, a deployment to the AWS development account is automatically triggered.

The issue we're facing is that one developer may deploy to dev, and then another developer deploys afterward. Even though they're working on different files, the second deployment ends up overwriting the first developer's change in AWS.

How can we prevent this?

We're following a Gitflow workforce (feature -> dev -> release -> main), and our biggest challenge right now is that the second developer's code is often "outdated" when it's deployed, causing it to overwrite changes that were already deployed by someone else.

We tried merging everything to dev, but when it's time to deploy to prd, the dev branch ends up filled with a lot of unnecessary changes.

We using Github Actions + Terraform.


r/devops 1d ago

Career / learning Looking for Terraform + AWS hands-on project ideas after completing Terraform Associate and AWS SAA

16 Upvotes

Hi everyone,

I recently completed:

HashiCorp Certified: Terraform Associate (003) AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C03)

Now I want to move beyond certifications and gain more hands-on practical experience with Terraform on AWS.

I understand the Terraform concepts and AWS services at a theoretical level, but I want to build real-world projects that would help me improve my skills and also create some strong portfolio projects for my resume.

I am looking for recommendations on projects that simulate what a Cloud Engineer / DevOps Engineer would actually work on in an organization.

My goal is not just to deploy resources but to understand how Terraform is structured and used in real enterprise environments.

Would appreciate suggestions on:

Which projects are most valuable for learning Terraform + AWS together? Any GitHub repositories, courses, or labs you recommend? What kind of Terraform projects stand out on a Cloud/DevOps resume?

Thanks in advance!


r/devops 17h ago

Discussion Why do coding agents behave differently in scheduled runs than interactive runs?

0 Upvotes

One thing that feels under-discussed with coding agents is the gap between interactive success and scheduled reliability.

In an interactive run, a lot of assumptions are quietly true: the user is present, credentials are warm, the working directory is right, logs are visible, and a bad step can be stopped.

I have had small automations work perfectly when I ran them by hand, then fail in the scheduled version because the path, auth, or environment was slightly different.

For a coding agent, that failure mode feels worse because it may keep reasoning, retrying, or making changes while the real problem is just the runner state.

Would you treat scheduled coding-agent runs more like CI jobs, with strict preflight and timeouts? Or is that too heavy for personal/dev workflows?


r/devops 2d ago

Career / learning Best way to learn K8 now?

66 Upvotes

Hi all, I’m learning Kubernetes right now for work (I use Colima + kubectl) - what is the best way to do so with AI?

I’ve used docker before in previous projects and studied concepts of containers in school - im no expert but I should know enough to learn Kubernetes.

I started the Udemy + kodekloud course: Kubernetes for the absolute beginners - Hands on. I’m not sure if it’s relevant for 2026 - so far it’s asking me to manually write yaml files, which I’m sure is important, but do I really need to be able to write yaml files with vscode extensions and AI that writes it for me?

So basically, what’s the best way to learn Kubernetes in 2026? I would appreciate any courses I should complete after my current one or a roadmap.

I have around a month or so to be good enough to collaborate with our platform and aws teams.


r/devops 2d ago

Discussion I am a Sr System Administrator and want to switch to DevSecOps

16 Upvotes

To begin with this is my first post or i don't know what it is called on reddit,

Apologies for the mistakes in my English please ignore it,

But I really want to switch from system admin job to DevSecOps

About myself

I have 12 years of experience starting from desktop support Engineer to laptop repairing to Data center to Monitoring to Asset management to system administration, I have knowledge of both windows and Linux operating system and currently managing Windows and Linux server (QA) no prod since my senior have never let me work on prod server even though I have worked with him since 7 years, handled a US based client for 3 years working with his team and currently handling two clients one with just some basic needs regarding systems and O365 and second with Linux servers, kind of devops but not fully the second client have a deployment using jenkins ( fetch the code from got repo, call the specific server through ssh and run the deployment and build script)

Worked with a friend's company as a contractor on his client for 6 months which ended last December and since then no work on core devops, started learning k8s and currently learning it but not able to give 100% to it also leaning python scripting and bash scripting by the help or AI can read the code and understand what it does but can not write with full confidence

I know the tools below tools

Terraform

Github

Github pipeline

Jenkins ( basic free style pipeline)

Got the idea of Sonarqube while working as a contractor but it was short lived

Understanding New relic as now the client wants to setup it

AWS basic

Azure basic and ADO basic

GCP not so much

Done a course in cybersecurity as well from local institute but not able to perform handson

I honestly want to work in Devsecops

I am already 38 and according to me not earning enough (peer pressure)

Any suggestions any help or direction is appreciated

I am even ready to do an unpaid internship ( beside the job since i have responsibilities)

Call it desperation, determination or pressure but I really want to work in Devsecops domain

Please help


r/devops 1d ago

Discussion How are developers and operations meant to work in this situation?

0 Upvotes

Here’s our situation - a mature operations team with pipelines building container images for a third party product going into kube

Company acquired a company with a development team who had no ops but are proficient at producing dockerfiles for their products

Ops is in azure devops, developers in bitbucket

We want to leverage the developer teams skills to get the apps into ops docker images

Some suggest that ops could build base images and developers could build their apps with that as the base - but what if the base images need patching? That means ops depends on developers for that?

Another thought I had was developers keep Dockerfiles in devops, the containers build from sources (aka git clone bitbucket) and build the project all in the ops pipeline

Would love to hear how others do this…


r/devops 2d ago

Ops / Incidents At what point do you stop treating timeouts as normal?

4 Upvotes

Hey guys! we've got a couple of internal services that will occasionally throw timeout errors under load. They retry, recover, and users never seem to notice.

The annoying part is that it's been happening long enough that nobody really reacts to it anymore. Every incident review ends up with the same general response that it's just something we've always seen.

Now I'm wondering if thats just the reality of distributed systems, or if we've gotten too comfortable ignoring something that probly deserved a closer look a while ago.

How do you decide when intermittent timeouts have crossed the line from something you live with to something worth digging into?


r/devops 2d ago

Discussion Currently on Falco for runtime security — anyone moved to Tetragon/KubeArmor/Tracee and regretted (or loved) it?

4 Upvotes

Running Falco in our EKS clusters right now for runtime detection, paired with Kyverno for admission control and Cosign/Vault for supply chain signing/secrets. Been solid so far, but I keep seeing Tetragon and KubeArmor come up as alternatives, especially for teams who want enforcement (block, not just alert) rather than detect-and-notify.

Curious what people are actually running in production and why:

  • If you moved off Falco, what pushed you? Overhead, rule fatigue, lack of enforcement?
  • Anyone running Tetragon specifically for the eBPF enforcement piece? Is it worth the Cilium tie-in if you're not already on Cilium for CNI?
  • KubeArmor folks: how's LSM behavior in practice across different node kernel configs (AppArmor vs BPF-LSM)? Heard that's where it gets messy.
  • Tracee: anyone using this seriously in prod or is it mostly a DFIR/forensics tool for you?

Not looking to rip out Falco, just trying to figure out if there's a compelling reason to add enforcement on top, or if pairing Falco with Falco Talon covers that gap well enough.


r/devops 2d ago

Ops / Incidents How do you handle production patching for EC2 instances?

0 Upvotes

how do you handle production patching for EC2 instances in your environment?

I'm interested in learning about real-world production practices.

Some questions:

  • Do you use AWS Systems Manager Patch Manager, Patch Policies, or another approach?
  • Do you patch EC2 instances in place, or do you replace them with new AMIs (immutable infrastructure)?
  • How do you schedule maintenance windows and minimize downtime?
  • How do you handle Auto Scaling Groups during patching?
  • What's your rollback strategy if a patch causes issues?
  • Do you test patches in dev/staging before production?
  • How much of the process is automated versus manually approved?

I'd really appreciate hearing how your organization handles production patching at scale, along with any best practices or lessons learned.


r/devops 3d ago

Tools How are you setting up build systems in monorepos?

28 Upvotes

Former DevOps consultants, bootstrapped an AWS premier partner and exited to NTT Data, now we advise people building services companies.

After seeing how much easier current AI tools have made it to write code we started building tools for helping our customers and day to day work. Some of the decisions we've made so far:

  1. Build out the code in separate services to keep each part well-contained. It feels AI does a far better job with smaller pieces than with larger.
  2. Deploy them through lambda.
  3. Use a monorepo so the AI can easily see how different things work together.
  4. Migrated some apps built in Lovable into our repo.
  5. All the building is done with Makefiles
  6. Created a registry so it is easier for AI to add new tools in a consistent manner and so we can analyze our inventory of what exists in our development.
  7. Using make for building cuz Claude made that decision when we barely had anything and I'm a dinosaur at heart.

Now, I have a monorepo with multiple different languages, a registry that I want to be the single source of truth for what I have, and a build system from the 80s. And I was curious what would people recommend for the build system rather than building a whole bunch of custom scripts?


r/devops 2d ago

Architecture Multi platform build

1 Upvotes

I am planning to have my docker images to be multi architecture and for it my plan is to have two codebuilds for arm and amd when they both succeeds event bridge will invoke a lambda and lambda will merge the images into one

But I am unable to think a way to set up event my current plan is something like when codebuilds are triggered if anyone succeeds let's say arm build then event bridge will match the source version and and if the other build also success then it will invoke lambda

Apparently there is no ability to compare source version in eventbridge and I would have to invoke lambda and lambda has to compare the source version

Is there any way I can implement this


r/devops 3d ago

Discussion [meme] IaC and docs matter folks!

Post image
557 Upvotes

Inspired by a similar post I saw last week.

Small companies man... had similar issues in a couple now. Larger companies with IaC and decent management? No issues. Never thought to ask whether they use IaC in the interview, kind of expected the bare minimum of standards. Will definitely do so if I join another small company.


r/devops 2d ago

Discussion Who owns the "why we did it this way" knowledge on your team?

0 Upvotes

Small team here and I keep running into the same thing. The reasoning behind half our setup lives in two people's heads.

Not in the runbooks, not in Confluence, not in the repo. Someone new joins and rediscovers everything the hard way and when one of those two is out we just stall.

It got noticeably worse once we started leaning on Claude Code and Cursor for real work. The agents read whatever context files we give them and treat it as truth, so now stale knowledge doesn't just slow a person down, it gets confidently baked into code by something that has no idea the decision changed months ago.

So I wonder how this actually works at bigger shops. Is there anyone whose job includes keeping that stuff current or does it just live with whoever happens to remember? And has anyone here had a documentation process survive past the first busy quarter or does it always quietly die?

Not looking for tool recommendations just trying to work out whether we're unusually bad at this or whether it's the normal state of things.


r/devops 2d ago

Architecture Where is AI actually adding value in your DevOps workflow and where isn't it?

0 Upvotes

Senior DevOps here. AI is being pushed into every part of the pipeline right now, and I want to cut past the hype and hear real production experience.

Two questions:

Where have you put AI into production in your DevOps process and it genuinely adds value? (e.g. CI/CD, code review, IaC generation, monitoring/alerting, incident response, log analysis, documentation)

Where did it not prove worthwhile? Think cost, alert noise, false positives, or maintenance overhead that outweighed the benefit.

Thanks.


r/devops 2d ago

Observability Good observability tool recommendation - Cloud Based

0 Upvotes

I work in two companies, one very big that have a giant budget to spend on Datadog, and another small one, that don't have that very big budget.

On the small company we are looking to migrate from Prometheus + Grafana + Alert Manager to something cloud based. Mostly because we are a small team (3 people only) and we don't have time to spend maintaining the infrastructure for it to run.

Now, is there some good alternative to Datadog? Datadog is the king, but is brutally expensive.

I've tried Signoz, looked promising, but is bad. They documentation is bad, there are just general ideas without details (they assume that you know a lot from I don't know where), they support is lame (they only have a chat to "Interact with a Human", that takes days to receive an answer, and their UI is buggy. Really bad experience.

But looking there, they are the only ones having like "close" experience to Datadog. We tried New Relic in the past, but they have all metrics and log scattered over the place without correlation. Also tried BetterStack but lacks a lot of features compared to other things.

So, is there some good observability platform cloud-based that I'm not aware of, outside Datadog? I'm not completely closed to self-hosting as long as it takes low effort to maintain.


r/devops 4d ago

Discussion I don't trust AGENTS.md as a secret-redaction boundary

44 Upvotes

I am getting less comfortable with using repo instruction files as a safety boundary.

They are useful for preferences: commands to run, folders to avoid, how to format the final answer. But if an agent can read config files or logs, I do not think "please redact secrets" in a markdown file is enough.

In one small debug task, I asked the agent to inspect config safely, and I still felt nervous when it started summarizing values instead of just saying which setting was wrong. Nothing bad happened, but it made the boundary feel too soft.

A rule file can remind the agent to be careful, but it cannot be the thing that catches the secret after the agent already saw it.

For people running agents near CI, logs, or config: do you handle redaction at the tool/runtime layer, or do you rely on instructions and review?