Best of DevOps — November 2025

1
Article
selfhosted·27w
What to do with an old laptop?
A developer seeks advice on repurposing a 2014-2015 laptop (Intel i5, 8GB RAM, 500GB SSD) into a home server for running scripts, cron jobs, and self-hosted services. Key considerations include choosing a lightweight Ubuntu-based Linux distribution, enabling SSH access, minimizing resource usage and noise, optimal placement near the router, and whether to disconnect the screen for power savings. The goal is a 24/7 server for automation tasks, data storage, and services like Pi-hole, self-hosted cloud storage, and workflow automation tools.
246
52
2
Article
David Heinemeier Hansson·24w
No backup, no cry
A modern approach to data management that eliminates traditional full-system backups by treating computers as disposable, stateless units. The strategy relies on distributed copies through services like Dropbox and GitHub, combined with full-disk encryption, ensuring all important data exists in multiple locations. This setup allows for quick recovery and system restoration, with configuration automated through ISO setups that can install a fully functional system in minutes.
182
7
3
Article
Hacker News·26w
Send this article to your friend who still thinks the cloud is a good idea
A developer shares their experience moving projects from AWS to bare-metal servers with Hetzner, achieving 10x cost savings and 2x performance improvement. The piece argues that cloud services like AWS charge excessive markups (10x-100x) compared to renting or buying servers directly, and that most small-to-medium businesses don't need expensive managed cloud services. It challenges common fears about server management, suggesting that with modern tools like AI assistants, managing Linux servers is accessible and cost-effective for most developers.
93
18
4
Article
GitHub Changelog·26w
New releases for GitHub Actions
GitHub Actions introduces three major updates: reusable workflow limits increased to 10 nested workflows and 50 total workflows per run (up from 4 and 20), M2-powered macOS runners now generally available with GPU acceleration, and GitHub Copilot coding agent can now operate independently without requiring GitHub Actions to be enabled.
82
2
5
Article
Slack engineering·26w
Build better software to build software better
Slack's engineering team reduced their build pipeline time from 60 minutes to as little as 10 minutes by applying software engineering principles to their build system. They migrated to Bazel while addressing fundamental architectural issues: breaking circular dependencies between frontend and backend code, separating build logic from application code, and creating granular, cacheable build units. The key insight was treating build performance like code performance—optimizing through caching and parallelization while maintaining hermetic, idempotent build steps. This required months of refactoring to properly separate concerns across Python backend, TypeScript frontend, and build orchestration layers.
67
3
6
Article
selfhosted·27w
Nixopus: one-click app hosting on your own server (install apps just like on your phone) now can be extended with extensions.
Nixopus is an open-source platform that simplifies self-hosting applications on your own server with a user-friendly interface. The new Extensions feature enables one-click deployment of 100+ applications like Appwrite, Excalidraw, and Ollama, with custom domain support, live build logs, and transparent configuration. Users can browse available apps, deploy them instantly, manage all running services from a single dashboard, and even package their own applications as extensions by adding a single file.
58
3
7
Article
Hacker News·25w
The Grafana trust problem
An experienced engineer shares their journey with Grafana's observability stack, detailing how frequent architectural changes, deprecations, and increasing complexity have eroded trust. Starting with simple Loki/Prometheus setups, they've witnessed rapid product churn—Grafana Agent deprecated within 2-3 years, OnCall discontinued, and Mimir 3.0 now requiring Kafka. The constant restructuring, incompatibilities with Prometheus Operator standards, and career-driven development pace make it difficult to maintain stable monitoring infrastructure. While acknowledging the technical quality of Grafana products, the author questions their long-term viability and considers alternatives like the kube-prometheus-stack with Thanos.
57
4
8
Article
databricks·24w
The New Way to Build Pipelines on Databricks: Introducing the IDE for Data Engineering
Databricks launched the IDE for Data Engineering in Public Preview, a dedicated development environment for building declarative data pipelines within the Databricks Workspace. The IDE provides an integrated experience with features like automatic dependency graph visualization, file-based dataset organization, built-in data previews, debugging tools, and Git integration. It supports the declarative programming paradigm where developers specify what they want to achieve rather than how to build it, with the editor handling execution planning and optimization. The tool consolidates pipeline authoring, testing, version control, and scheduling into a single interface, aiming to improve developer productivity and reduce context switching.
44
9
Article
omg! ubuntu!·26w
Ubuntu 26.04 LTS Release Date & Schedule
Ubuntu 26.04 LTS 'Resolute Raccoon' releases April 23, 2026, with 5 years of standard support and 5 additional years through Ubuntu Pro. Key milestones include feature freeze on February 19, beta release March 26, and release candidate April 16. Monthly development snapshots start in November 2025. Expected features include GNOME 50, latest Linux kernel, improved TPM encryption, and potential amd64v3 package support. Upgrades from Ubuntu 24.04 LTS will be enabled with the 26.04.1 point release in August 2026.
44
4
10
Article
Serdarcan Buyukdereli·24w
Life After NGINX: The New Era of Kubernetes Ingress & Gateways
A comprehensive comparison of Kubernetes ingress and gateway solutions beyond NGINX, evaluating Traefik, Istio, Kong, Cilium, Pomerium, kgateway, HAProxy, and Contour. The guide analyzes each tool across architecture, traffic management, security features, observability, performance, and future-proofing to help DevOps engineers and SREs make informed production decisions. Includes practical YAML examples, a detailed scoring matrix, and insights on Gateway API adoption for long-term infrastructure planning.
42
2
11
Video
Fireship·24w
The entire internet just crashed... again
Cloudflare experienced a major global outage affecting millions of websites including ChatGPT, X (Twitter), and League of Legends. The root cause was a latent bug in their bot mitigation service triggered by a routine configuration change. An automatically generated configuration file for managing threat traffic grew beyond its expected size, causing crashes across multiple Cloudflare services. The incident highlights the internet's dependence on centralized infrastructure providers and the cascading impact when they fail.
41
6
12
Article
Raghav·27w
Nixopus: one-click app hosting on your own server (install apps just like on your phone) now can be extended with extensions.
Nixopus is an open-source platform that simplifies self-hosting applications on your own server with a user-friendly interface. The new Extensions feature enables one-click deployment of 100+ applications like Appwrite, Excalidraw, and Ollama, with custom domain support, live build logs, and transparent configuration. Users can browse available apps, deploy them instantly, manage all running services from a single dashboard, and even package their own applications as extensions by adding a single file.
40
1
13
Article
Game Developer·25w
Take Two CEO: Rockstar chasing 'perfection' with GTA VI
Grand Theft Auto VI has been delayed to November 2026, marking a 13-year gap since GTA V. Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick attributes the delay to Rockstar's pursuit of perfection, emphasizing the studio's culture of performance and excellence. The announcement came alongside strong Q2 financial results, with Take-Two recording $1.96 billion in net bookings. GTA V continues to perform well with over 220 million lifetime sales, and the company expects GTA VI to deliver record-breaking results when it launches.
37
14
14
Article
Lobsters·25w
5.0.0
Homebrew 5.0.0 introduces parallel downloads by default, official Linux ARM64 support, and announces deprecation timelines for macOS Intel (Tier 3 by September 2026, discontinued by September 2027). The release removes macOS Gatekeeper bypass options, adds a new internal JSON API, and includes numerous improvements to brew commands including bundle support for Go packages, Alpine Linux package search, and enhanced cask functionality on Linux.
37
15
Article
The Register·26w
Microsoft's lack of quality control is out of control
Microsoft's quality control has deteriorated significantly since 2014 when the company laid off many testers in favor of agile methodologies. Recent years have seen repeated issues including the Windows 10 October 2018 Update that deleted user files, frequent problematic Windows updates, and multiple Azure outages caused by faulty configuration changes. While some Windows issues may be understandable given the vast ecosystem, the recurring Azure production failures raise serious questions about Microsoft's competence in managing its own infrastructure.
37
15
16
Article
ByteByteGo·26w
How Datadog Built a Custom Database to Ingest Billions of Metrics Per Second
Datadog built Monocle, a custom time-series database in Rust, to handle billions of metrics per second. The system uses Kafka for data distribution and replication, separates metadata storage from time-series data, and employs a thread-per-core architecture with LSM-tree storage. Key optimizations include arena allocators, time-based file pruning, and cost-based query scheduling. The platform splits storage into real-time (24 hours) and long-term systems, with the real-time database handling 99% of queries. Future plans include dynamic load balancing and merging separate databases into a unified columnar format.
37
17
Article
PostgreSQL·24w
Autobase 2.5.0 released
Autobase 2.5.0 introduces Expert Mode to its UI, enabling advanced cluster configuration options for experienced users. Key features include a YAML editor for custom parameters, updated cloud provider pricing and instance specifications (Hetzner ARM instances, 4th-gen Intel on AWS/GCP), configurable IOPS and throughput for AWS EBS volumes, and Ansible 12 compatibility. Autobase is an open-source tool for deploying and managing highly available PostgreSQL clusters, automating tasks like deployment, failover, backups, and scaling without requiring deep DBA expertise.
36
1
18
Article
Hacker News·23w
Introducing the New Runbook Execution Engine
Atuin Desktop v0.2.0 introduces a completely redesigned runbook execution engine that makes developer workflows persistent, reproducible, and reliable. The new architecture moves execution from TypeScript to Rust, introduces passive and active context types, enables template usage everywhere including self-referential variables, and persists state across app restarts. Key changes include removing global context, improving variable handling, and separating stdout from stderr in script outputs. This foundation enables future features like CLI-based execution, improved serial execution, secrets management, and markdown-based runbooks.
35
19
Article
Noted·25w
Cronmaster: Self-Hosted Cron Control with a Clean UI
Cronmaster is a self-hosted web UI for managing cron jobs and bash scripts on host machines. Built with Next.js, TypeScript, and Tailwind, it ships as a Docker container offering visual cron management, script editing with snippets, and system monitoring. The tool requires privileged container access and host mounts to edit crontabs in real-time, making it ideal for homelab operators and small server admins who prioritize convenience over strict security isolation. Installation is straightforward via Docker Compose, though the privilege model and host dependencies present tradeoffs for production environments.
36
20
Video
CodeHead·24w
The Docker Alternative Most People DON'T KNOW
Podman is a Red Hat-backed container engine that offers a daemonless, rootless alternative to Docker while maintaining command compatibility. It provides native pod support similar to Kubernetes, can export pod definitions directly to Kubernetes YAML, and eliminates security risks associated with Docker's root-privileged daemon. The tool runs OCI-compliant containers, offers near drop-in replacement for Docker commands, and allows developers to build custom extensions while maintaining a smaller attack surface through its rootless architecture.
34
21
Video
Awesome·24w
The whole internet was down... again...
Recent major outages from Cloudflare and AWS exposed critical vulnerabilities in modern internet infrastructure. While cloud services promised decentralization and resilience, the industry has consolidated around a few vendors using default configurations. Cloudflare's outage was caused by an oversized feature file in their Bot Manager component. The real issue isn't the outages themselves, but the illusion of resilience created by cloud-native tools while actually centralizing failure points. Modern developers increasingly lack the knowledge to build systems that gracefully handle failures, relying instead on configuration wizards and AI assistance.
34
22
Article
Charity·24w
From Cloudwashing to O11ywashing
The term 'observability' has been co-opted by vendors to mean traditional monitoring tools that only track system uptime, losing its original meaning of understanding service quality from each customer's perspective. This 'o11ywashing' mirrors the 'cloudwashing' phenomenon where vendors rebrand existing products with trendy terminology. True observability requires unified telemetry combining app, business, and system data to slice by customer ID and other dimensions, not just separate metrics, logs, and traces. Engineering executives need better education on this distinction to avoid investing in rebranded monitoring tools that can't solve their actual problems.
33
1
23
Video
DevOps Toolbox·23w
I replaced Docker with THIS.
Devbox is a CLI tool that creates reproducible development environments using the Nix package manager under the hood, but with significantly less complexity. It allows developers to specify project-specific package versions through a simple JSON configuration file, automatically activates environments when entering project directories via direnv integration, supports global package installation, includes plugins for common services like nginx and PostgreSQL, and provides npm-style run scripts without framework dependencies. The tool eliminates the need to juggle multiple version managers while avoiding Docker's overhead for local development.
32
10
24
Article
TechCrunch·25w
Red Bull Racing’s secret weapon? An engineer who treats workflows like lap times
Red Bull Racing's new CEO Laurent Mekies applies engineering principles to organizational workflows, treating security and system access as performance optimization opportunities rather than friction points. His partnership with 1Password demonstrates how eliminating workflow bottlenecks—like authentication delays—can create competitive advantages. Mekies' technical background shapes his leadership approach: focusing on process efficiency, understanding root causes before moving forward, and empowering 2,000 team members rather than seeking spotlight. The team faces a major technical challenge in 2026, building their own power unit from scratch while competing against manufacturers with 90+ years of experience.
29
4
25
Video
Nick Chapsas·24w
Another .NET Open-Source Project is Gone
Nuke, a popular .NET CI/CD build automation tool with 3,500 GitHub stars and 26 million downloads, faced potential abandonment due to open-source sustainability issues. Creator Matias experienced burnout from maintaining the project without adequate community support or financial compensation. After community outcry and expressions of support, Matias released version 10.0 with critical updates including SLNX support and dependency updates. The situation highlights ongoing challenges in open-source sustainability, with suggestions that commercialization might be a viable path forward for maintaining such projects.
28

See all DevOps archives