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The latest News and Information on DevOps, CI/CD, Automation and related technologies.

Why artifact management can't stop at npm and Python

npm and Python get all the security attention, but attackers don't limit themselves to your highest-volume formats. A Docker image, a Helm chart, or a Rust crate can all be an entry point. If your security policy is built around the formats you use most, the formats you've deprioritized become the blind spot. This video breaks down why artifact management needs to be centralized across every package format, not just the popular ones.

Reliability Engineering in the AI Era

Engineering leaders have been claiming to “shift quality left” for years but production remains stubbornly stuck out of reach of software engineers. The realm of production remains mysterious with tools no one has access to and UIs that wouldn’t make sense to engineers anyway. I’ve noticed a small but growing trend of large enterprises hiring Reliability Engineers instead of Site Reliability Engineers. Dropping one word looks cosmetic but I think it points to a much bigger change.

From Telemetry to Traffic

A metric says latency increased. A log says a request failed. A trace identifies the slow dependency. An APM agent points to the method. Manual instrumentation explains the business operation. Traffic capture shows the exact request and response that triggered it. Each layer answers a question the previous layer could not. Each also introduces a new cost, blind spot, and failure mode.

Our Newest Infrastructure Partner: Cherry Servers

We're thrilled to announce that we've added Cherry Servers, a European infrastructure provider, as another native integration to the Cycle platform. With this integration, Cycle clients have more choice in where, and how, they deploy their applications as Cherry offers a variety of bare metal server configurations across 7 data centers located around the globe. For a more formal announcement, please see our joint press release with Cherry Servers.

Infrastructure Automation Tools Comparison: Provisioning vs. Orchestration Layer

Infrastructure automation tools by layer: provisioning (Terraform, OpenTofu, Pulumi, CDK, Crossplane) vs. orchestration (Spacelift, env0, Scalr, Qovery). Melanie leads content at Qovery. She covers platform engineering trends, Kubernetes operations, FinOps, and the tools that help engineering teams ship faster.

Why AI agents don't need infrastructure running 24/7

AI agents don't need a server sitting there while they wait for the next prompt. They need infrastructure that shows up, does the job, and disappears. In this Product Highlights conversation, Nicolas Gommenginger, director of product at Upsun with more than four years leading the platform's core functionality, breaks down Upsun's newest primitive: task containers. His take: "What really triggered us to go ahead and implement it is the rise of AI agents, because tasks are something ideal for running them." We get into.

Stop paying for compute that does nothing six days a week

Most teams are paying for a container that stays awake all week to run one job on Friday. Task containers are the fix: they spin up on an API call, run exactly one command, then remove themselves. In this Product Highlights conversation, Corey Dockendorf, a senior solutions architect at Upsun with most of 25 years in tech behind him and five at the company, breaks down how ephemeral task containers cut idle spend and give AI agents production context without production access. His take: "They spin up when they're triggered directly by an API call.

Your preview environment is lying to you without production data

A preview link with an empty database tells you almost nothing about a content-managed site. Most teams find that out the expensive way, in front of a client. In this Product Highlights conversation, Andrew Kester, a senior cloud support engineer at Upsun whose team handles everything from product questions to sites under active attack, twenty four hours a day, every day of the year, breaks down why cloning services and data into every environment is the feature he would have paid for at his old agency job. His take: "You click a button. We clone your services. We clone the data." We get into.

Shipped: A changelog that keeps up with how fast we ship

When the changelog doesn’t keep pace with the product, two things can happen. One, you keep working around something that was already fixed weeks ago. Or two, a behavior changes, you assume it’s a bug, and you spend an afternoon on triage and a support ticket before learning it was an intentional improvement. CloudZero now ships around 30 improvements a week, a pace driven by the Next Gen Platform and the AI-first approach we’re building for our customers.

Token budgets: capping AI agent and LLM spend

AI costs are changing. As noted by research from EY, outputs that cost just $0.04 in 2023 now cost $1.20, a 30x increase over just three years. It’s worth noting that task operations and complexity have also changed. In 2023, the process was simple. Users input a question, retrieval engines found relevant data, and AI models returned a response. Today, many tasks are handled by orchestrated AI agents capable of much more complex reasoning and analysis.