CatOps

External Secrets Operator is a very popular tool to sync secrets from your credentials storage into Kubernetes. Unfortunately, they have faced the same problem that many open source tools do: lack of resources to either do unpaid work, or hire someone to do things.

They have announced it on Reddit.

What does it mean for the project? Here's an excerpt from their post:

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What We’re Still Doing

✅ We’ll still review and merge community PRs

✅ Contributions will be available on the main branch

❌ We’re pausing all release activities: no new versions (including patches, majors, minors)

❌ We’ll stop responding to support issues and GitHub Discussions for now

How You Can Help

If your company depends on ESO - and many do - now is the time to step up. Whether you’re an individual contributor or part of an open source team, we’d love your help.

We’re open to onboarding new maintainers, defining ownership areas, and sharing responsibilities. You don’t need to be an expert - we’ll help you ramp up.

➡️ To get involved, please sign up using this form.

📚 You can also follow this GitHub Discussion for context.

We didn’t want to do this. But too many OSS projects are quietly dying because they’ve been taken for granted - used in production by thousands but maintained by a handful.
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#kubernetes #security

Design patterns are important in a way that they allow us all to speak the same language, and align on things just by calling them by their name. Also, more often than not, they do make sense in the real world applications.

It doesn't mean that you need to implement all of them all the time, but it is important to be able to recognize them and apply when they make sense.

Here's an article with some design patterns for microservices that are quite common in the wild.

#system_design

Today, I'd like to share with you two new bundles from Humble Bundle:

- Linux Complete book bundle by Pearson
- Security by Apress book bundle

The first bundle has some amazing books like the "Unix and Linux Handbook" and performance books by Brendan Gregg!

#books

​​For today's donations Monday, I'd like to remind you about a huge fundraiser by DOU.ua for the 3rd Assault Brigade:

https://send.monobank.ua/jar/AGK8qiQwQX

More info is here (in Ukrainian).

#donations #Monday

A new CatOps digest is here!
https://newsletter.catops.dev/p/catops-digest-2025-08-08

#digest #newsletter

I'm not sure, if you need yet another Kubernetes operator for PostgreSQL, but people on Reddit claim that it's good.

#postgres #databases #kubernetes

Some time ago, I shared an article from Honeycomb that had a notion of the "durable vs disposable" code. The gist is that there are two fundamental types of code bases: durable (OSes, databases, compilers, etc.) - those that should be predictable and stable; and disposable (PoCs, experiments, etc.).

In her new article, Charity Majors elaborates on this concept. There are some insightful things there. For example, that the cost of software is defined not by how hard is to write the code, but what degree do you need to maintain it. Also:

If I had to guess, I suspect it [writing the code\] won’t be a profession at all so much as a skill set, much like typing or spreadsheets, that any tech-literate modern worker is expected to pick up in order to perform the functions of their job in marketing, sales, product, design, etc.

However

Anything that can be done with disposable code probably will be, because as we all know, durable software is expensive and hard. But disposable software is a skill set; durable code is a profession.

Anyway, this is an interesting read.

#culture #programming #ai

​​A friend of mine is raising funds for a generator and portable batteries for the 36th brigade.

You can donate to the Monobank Jar below:
https://send.monobank.ua/jar/6GhVVifhXG

You can find a report from the previous fundraiser on Instagram

#donations #Ukraine

Today, I'd like to share with you the results of the annual StackOverflow survey, which may be a nice Friday read.

There are some interesting things in this survey. For example, 3/4 of respondents are not happy at their jobs, a bit more than 1/3 works remotely, 84% of respondents used AI this year, and 47% replied that they used them daily.

However, one should acknowledge inherited biases of this survey. A good illustration for is that the fact that 81% have account on StackOverflow: a survey done on the Internet confirmed that people use Internet, you get it...

There's an interesting discussion on Reddit under an article that META will let job candidates use AI during the interview.

The article itself is behind a paywall, but the comments are more interesting. Apparently, there's no huge backlash against it. Moreover, many folks welcome this change, since it may remove universally hated LeetCode interviews.

Some folks have even mentioned that they allow to use AI on their interviews as well.

At the first glance, it may seem like this would drastically simplify the process (it may). However, it also means that there will be no longer easy to memorize Fibonacci tasks. Instead, it may be a coding interview combined with system design and what not. In any case, this is too early to tell what would be the broader impact of this change. The only certain thing is that the hiring process cannot stay the same in the age of AI.

#hiring #ai

"Invert, always invert", - Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, probably.

There is a ton of articles online on how to make your database faster, but how many articles are there about how to make your database slower?

Making Postgres 42,000x slower because I am unemployed is a fun read about how to almost grind Postgres to a halt by only tweaking the postgresql.conf. No specially crafted slow queries - only config.

As the result, the author managed to make his Postgres installation 42 000x times slower compared to the initial benchmarks. tl;dr: tinkering around with the number of IO operations (cache size, vacuum periods, WAL checkpoints) and making the IO single-threaded do the trick here.

#databases #postgresql

You likely know about it already, but to reiterate.

Bitnami introduces changes to its catalog from August 28th, 2025.

tl;dr: All the existing images will be moved to the legacy repository, and only the latest tag would be available for free from now on. If you want to continue using their mainline images, you have to pay a subscription fee.

Open source Helm charts will continue being open source, but "enterprise-grade" (whatever that means) charts would be available for subscription as well.

So, check your images & charts!

#kubernetes #docker #bitnami

​​For today's Donations Monday, I'd like to remind you about a big fundraiser by DOU UA for the 3rd Assault Brigade, which has recently crossed its 50% milestone!

https://send.monobank.ua/jar/AGK8qiQwQX

More information is available on a dedicated web page (in Ukrainian).

#donations #Monday

Today, I'd like to share two articles on Aurora with you:

- One on how Atlassian migrated their RDS instances for Jira to Aurora
- The second is on the blue/green upgrades functionality in Aurora


#aws #databases #db

Supercharging Development With Dapr and mirrord.

I want to share this article because of the latter. Mirrord looks very similar to Telepresence - it can mirror traffic from an existing cluster to your local setup instead of spawning things in the cluster itself. It would be great to see a comparison between the two, though.

Dapr, on another hand, is kind of a more niche project. It can abstract different brokers behind a unified API. I first learned about it at CfgMgmt Camp a couple of years ago. The problem is that if you do need to abstract several brokers in the scope of a single codebase, that must be a special case. Also, since you need to keep the API universal, Dapr only provides as many features as the least feature-rich broker does, which is a natural limitation.

Anyway, if you have used Dapr in production, that would be interesting to hear your insights!

#kubernetes

3 Humble bundles in one post!

So, I don’t need to make a post for each of them.

- SQL and Databases by O’Reilly.
- Learn Programming by Zenva
- Linux courses by Packt.

Cheers!

#books #bundle

​​For today’s Donations Monday, I would like to remind you that the fundraiser for the ground drones workshop is still open!

https://send.monobank.ua/jar/2nxQiPG4LU

#donations #Ukraine

By the popular vote, we are doing digests on Friday now. So, here it is!

https://newsletter.catops.dev/p/catops-digest-2025-07-18

#digest #newsletter

A lot of people dislike Helm, and yet those are the same people, who use it. Rephrasing Bjarne Stroustrup: there are tools that people hate, and tools that no one uses.

Here's yet another example of a fair criticism of Helm.

I think the problem raised by this article lays however deeper that it appears at the first glance. Sure, it is easier to "validate" the plain YAML with your eyes than YAML with GoTemplate logic on top of it. Still, this problem is kind of solved in the "conventional" software engineering already. Normally, you do not reimplement everything from scratch, and you do not read the whole library codebase when doing your import foo. There are downsides, ofc, but somehow this whole industry works.

In my opinion, we should start treating other people's charts (modules, roles, recipes, what have you) as libraries, not "someone else's shell scripts". Thus, tests and documentation shouldn't be an afterthought, even when it comes to the internal things. Moreover, it's on you to write acceptance tests for your use-case. Maintaining some tests is much easier than parsing walls of YAML by yourself, trust me.

P.S. If you're interested in testing of Helm charts (including 3rd-party ones), I have a two-parter on this: Part I and Part II.

P.P.S. I also recall a quote from Kelsey Hightower that YAML is just Kubernetes' Assembly. The fact that you can read and understand it doesn't mean you have to.

#kubernetes #helm

​​Today we continue raising funds for the workshop that repairs ground drones.

2/3 of the goal is already reached. Let's push it towards the completion!

https://send.monobank.ua/jar/2nxQiPG4LU

#donations #Ukraine