Browse DevOps Blogs (27)

Matt Stratton talks with Naga Sujitha Vummaneni and Sundeep Bobba about reframing CI/CD pipelines as control systems, using feedback signals, constraints, and bounded automation to keep delivery stable—especially as AI-driven changes increase the pace and volume of deployments.

Jesse Houwing shares a practical checklist for deciding whether a third-party GitHub Action is safe to run in your CI environment, focusing on maintenance signals, dependency hygiene, release integrity, and governance. He also explains why pinning what you run matters, and compares SHA pinning, immutable releases, and action lock files.

Jesse Houwing explains why GitHub Copilot cloud agent sessions can’t be spawned from GitHub Actions using GITHUB_TOKEN, and how GitHub’s accountability model (identity, billing, and auditability) shapes what “agentic workflows” can do today. He then lays out practical orchestration patterns that work, with concrete YAML examples.

Jesse Houwing explains how to stop GitHub Copilot agents from confidently inventing details about fast-moving tools by grounding them in a local clone of the real repository, then forcing answers to be backed by file-and-line citations from the source.

DevClass reviews Kubernetes v1.37 (Garhwal), focusing on production-readiness changes like the Metrics API reaching GA, upcoming removals of kube-dns, IPVS mode in kube-proxy, and cgroup v1, plus new features around autoscaling, watch cache behavior, and stricter YAML conventions via KYAML.

Scott Hanselman walks through diagnosing unexpectedly slow 10GbE file transfers by isolating storage from networking with iperf3, then fixing a Windows NIC bottleneck by increasing receive buffers and disabling Large Send Offload (LSO) V2 for IPv4 on an Intel E610-XT2 adapter.

John Naguib lays out a practical architecture for building self-improving AI agents on Azure, focusing on controlled feedback loops (evaluate, learn, test, approve) rather than uncontrolled self-modification. The guide covers agent runtime, tool calling, RAG, memory/experience stores, evaluation, observability, and governance for production use.

DevClass summarizes how Cursor designed its Origin Git repository service to handle Git at large scale, drawing on Vicent Martí’s write-up about Git’s DAG traversal costs, replica synchronization limits, and an object-storage-backed approach using a write-ahead log plus local NVMe caches.

Scott Hanselman walks through a real-world NAS migration from Synology to a UniFi UNAS Pro 8 using Windows and Robocopy, including how he debugged Windows error 665, handled NTFS Alternate Data Streams, and tuned Robocopy switches to avoid major performance traps.

Hidde de Smet explains Agent Plugins 1.0, a small packaging standard that lets teams ship portable Agent Skills and MCP server definitions once, while keeping Copilot-specific extras in a namespaced folder. The post covers the required file layout, manifest and MCP schemas, and enterprise governance controls for plugin and MCP server policy.

Matt Stratton talks with Doug Pagnutti about “industrial DevOps”: the long-running friction between corporate IT and plant-floor OT in manufacturing, why incentives and ticket-driven workflows create risky workarounds, and how security and data-sharing requirements are forcing the two worlds to converge.

DevClass reports on ChainDrop, a new Shai-Hulud npm worm variant that compromises packages via tarballs and can persist through repository configuration files, enabling credential theft and further propagation. The article explains how the attack spreads through npm, GitHub, and developer tools like VS Code, and outlines practical checks and mitigations.

John Edward outlines practical Azure architecture best practices for enterprise applications, covering the Azure Well-Architected Framework, scalability and high availability patterns, security with Zero Trust, observability, infrastructure as code, CI/CD, cost controls, networking, disaster recovery, and governance.

Hidde de Smet audits a local SKILL.md “skills” library spread across Claude Code, a shared .agents catalog, and GitHub Copilot’s VS Code setup, showing how silent failures (missing files, duplicates, stale references) accumulate over time and how to stocktake them with a checklist and a couple of shell one-liners.

Thomas Maurer explains what AKS on bare metal is and where it fits for on-premises, edge, and sovereign deployments, focusing on how it keeps the AKS experience while running directly on physical hardware. He also outlines a deployment path using Azure Local SFF with Arc-based management.

Rob Bos shares a curated set of GitHub governance references he regularly sends to teams, covering enterprise platform baselines, GitHub Actions supply-chain controls, GitHub Advanced Security rollout and triage practices, and GitHub Copilot governance topics like premium requests, extension governance, and MCP-related security notes.

Hidde de Smet breaks down why spec-driven development can either reduce risk or quietly add “delivery debt”, especially in regulated environments. He outlines six common process cost centers, a three-lane model (full/light/no-spec), and a small set of KPIs to tell when structure is paying off.

DevClass reports on GitHub briefly offering to mail a CD-ROM copy of a public repository via a Microsoft Form, then pulling the offer after confusion and ridicule. The piece highlights how the stunt intersected with developer concerns about GitHub reliability, repo sizes, and long-term access to source code.

John Edward explains how Azure’s “Agentic Agents” can support resilient cloud operations across migration planning, observability, and continuous optimization. The article focuses on turning telemetry into actionable guidance, reducing alert fatigue, improving root-cause analysis, and driving cost, performance, security, and sustainability improvements in Azure environments.

John Edward explains how to get more out of Windows Terminal on Windows 11, focusing on practical workflow improvements like profiles, tabs, split panes, the command palette, and keyboard shortcuts, plus common setups for PowerShell, WSL, Git, and Azure CLI.

Hidde de Smet explains how MCP’s Enterprise-Managed Authorization changes MCP authentication from per-server OAuth consent to policy-driven sign-in via an identity provider, with VS Code 1.123 preview support for Entra ID, Okta, and Auth0 and governance controls that pair with GitHub Copilot’s MCP registry policies.

Thomas Maurer explains what Azure Local Small Form Factor (SFF) is and why it matters for edge scenarios, then outlines an end-to-end deployment flow: provisioning a device as an Azure resource, installing the Azure Local OS, registering it with Azure Arc, and running container workloads with Docker and K3s.

DevClass reports on Vercel’s Ship event announcements, focusing on the new open source eve agent framework and enterprise controls like Passport for bringing AI-built apps and agents under centralized identity and policy, including OpenID Connect support for providers such as Okta and Microsoft Entra ID.

DevClass reports on upcoming npm 12 default changes that stop install-time scripts from running automatically, aiming to reduce a major supply-chain attack surface on developer machines and CI runners. The piece explains the new flags, breaking-change impact, and how teams can prepare using npm 11.x settings.

Thomas Maurer explains Azure Local Simplified Machine Provisioning, a new workflow for provisioning physical Azure Local nodes with minimal on-site work while keeping configuration and control centralized in Azure.

Jesse Houwing explains how to connect Azure Pipelines to GitHub Enterprise Cloud with data residency (ghe.com) by manually installing the Azure Pipelines GitHub App, then creating a service connection and rewiring existing pipelines to use the new GitHub repo as their source.

Hidde de Smet shows how to add fast local guardrails for Azure Terraform by running fmt, validate, tflint, Trivy, and terraform-docs on every git commit. The post includes a working pre-commit config, Azure-specific lint rules, and an MCP-based workflow to keep generated HCL current and policy-aligned.