Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

AI agents are powerful. They're also unpredictable, non-deterministic, and capable of doing things you didn't ask them to do, as the Rome Alibaba and Claude Mythos case studies make very clear. The answer isn't to avoid agentic AI. It's to run it properly. In this demo, Ben Norris, founding engineer at relaxAI, shows how to build a fully sandboxed AI agent environment from scratch, an ephemeral Civo VM provisioned via Terraform and GitHub Actions, locked down with egress policies, an unprivileged Linux user, and hard resource caps, running a Claude Code session pointed at the relaxAI API.

Cortex co-founder and CTO Ganesh Datta sits down with Shawn Burke, Distinguished Engineer at Cortex, to explore what separates an operational excellence review that drives real engineering behavior from one that produces great conversation and nothing else. Shawn draws on experience from SoFi, Uber, and Microsoft to explain why these reviews so often fail—and how to build a process that actually sticks.

Most platform engineering stories are told in hindsight, with the rough edges smoothed out. On June 17th, we are doing it differently. Join us for Platform Engineering Unplugged, a frank conversation with a practitioner who has navigated the real challenges of building and scaling platform engineering. What worked, what didn't, and what they would do differently. If you lead engineering teams and are thinking seriously about platform engineering, this is the session for you.

Every dependency pull is a trust decision. Public registries don't vet what they serve. Cooldown policies give you a gate at the moment that matters most: when a package first enters your environment. Dan McKinney (Solutions Engineering Manager) walks through how Cloudsmith's cooldown policies work and how to configure one in under five minutes. What Dan covers.

Database software helps organize, manage, retrieve, and analyze data in databases. But what does that actually mean in practice? In this video, we explain what database software is using a simple library analogy, show how it helps add, edit, delete, and report on data. We also break down the main types of database tools used by developers, DBAs, analysts, and technical teams. You will also see examples of well-known database software, including SSMS, MySQL Workbench, pgAdmin, Oracle SQL Developer, JetBrains DataGrip, DBeaver, and dbForge Edge.

Your agent writes code fast, but you shouldn't have to see it until it's right. Chunk sidecars are lightweight microVMs that work inside the agent loop, requiring agents to pass pre-push validation in a CI-like environment before they declare they're "done." That means no massive CI pile-ups, no long round-trips that risk resetting your agent's context. You're sending code you already know is good.

Most AI applications in production right now were shipped on vibes. A developer ran a few queries, liked what they saw, and pushed to prod. Laurie Voss argues that's the core reason so many AI products feel broken, and the fix is simpler to name than it is to do: write the tests.