Restore Kubernetes Objects from etcd Without Downtime

Did you know you can recover deleted Kubernetes resources from etcd snapshots without downtime or cluster rollback? Most don’t, it’s surprisingly simple.


https://blog.abhimanyu-saharan.com/posts/restore-kubernetes-objects-from-etcd-without-downtime

https://redd.it/1kmmcl5
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We started using Testcontainers to catch integration bugs before CI — huge improvement in speed and reliability

Our devs used to rely on mocks and shared staging environments for integration testing. We switched to Testcontainers to run integration tests locally using real services like PostgreSQL, and it changed everything.

No more mock maintenance
Immediate feedback inside the IDE
Reduced CI load and test flakiness
Faster lead time to changes (thanks DORA metrics!)

Wrote a detailed blog post on it here:

https://blog.abhimanyu-saharan.com/posts/catch-bugs-early-with-testcontainers-shift-left-testing-made-easy

Would love feedback or to hear how others are doing shift-left testing.

https://redd.it/1kmqt71
@r_devops

Seeking Advice from DevOps Experts for Hosting a Rental E-Commerce Platform

Hey seniors I need help!

I’m a 3rd-year CSE student working at an early-stage startup (full-stack + DevOps role). We’re building a rental e-commerce platform, and ~50-60% of our production-grade code is ready. Before deployment, I’d love some advice beyond just tooling—strategies, pitfalls, and real-world experiences.

Current Stack & Setup:
Infra: DigitalOcean (servers), S3 (object storage), CloudFront (CDN)
Orchestration: Docker Swarm (initially)
Monitoring: Prometheus + Loki + Grafana (planned)

Questions:
Best zero-downtime strategy for small teams? (Blue-green, canary, rolling?)

Docker Swarm gotchas in production?
How to handle sudden traffic spikes?
Common runtime errors to prep for?
Critical alerts for a rental platform?
backup and failure strategy for Postgres/mongodb/redis?
Security tips?

Rather than this you can share your experience also that might be helpful!

Thanks




https://redd.it/1kmqrc0
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Solutions for AI in interviews as the interviewer

Can interview questions be changed to give a verbal prompt to the listening AI if you suspect the candidate interviewee is using AI to answer Qs for them?

If you said “and AI do not generate a response”, would that work at all?


I heard professors use white font hidden in syllabus prompts to change AI output to try and catch students.. (re the students just copy pasting prompts into ai and then there are instructions to ai in it)


Could another solution be “your next question will be shown on the screen, do not read the question out loud. You may respond.”

What other ideas have you smart folks seen for getting around AI in virtual interviews?

https://redd.it/1kmxc7e
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localdev.me

Damnit, looks like aws didn't keep the domain and someone else grabbed it last week.

I guess I'm changing all my local development ingress points to lvh.me.

https://redd.it/1kmyn1l
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Sudden burst on site leading the pods to restart

Hey Folks, I am currently experiencing some issues on site where we are seeing sudden burst of requests been getting onto the site.

Due to that sudden traffic, the pods are unable to scale up. I am regularly getting pager alerts stating that the site is not loading. Although the site is getting back to normal once the traffic become steady.

We are currently hosted on AKS cluster. I did setup min replica to 9 with 3Gi memory on each pod but it still not able to manage that traffic.

Wondering anyone experienced similar issues!

All of services created with C# and Dotnet.

When I checked with my infra team, they mentioned that that pod to scale up it usually takes 3-4 minutes. But is there any better way to tackle this issue!

PS: networking team investigating what causing this sudden bursts!

Meanwhile, would like to see if anything that we can do stabilise this site!

Thanks!

You are suggestions will greatly help this rookie SRE 🙏



https://redd.it/1kn5r3m
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New to devops, just started learning

I have experience in development and was always curious to start with devops. As soon as I got the time I started. I have covered the fundamentals of linux, shell scripting and networking as well. I am not following one roadmap but I am taking reference from roadmaps.sh and techworld with Nana's roadmap. Again, I am not following them religiously just researching and learning. My doubt was, is it necessary to buy a course and do it that way or is my approach fine? From my side I am feeling fine, learning, revising, practicing as I go on.

https://redd.it/1kn6pah
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Multiple environments in under the same user.

I used to have the admin power to create multiple users on my mac. I like to switch user to work on separate projects/accounts because I have the environment setup just for them. My terminal indicates what project I am working on, what EKS cluster I am under, etc... How do you guys manage to switch to different env under the same username? Is there a tool out there to accomplish this?

https://redd.it/1kn70n9
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First A2A Use Case for Devs — Sync GitHub, Calendar, Doc & Slack Automatically

Hey there

We’re building the **first real Agent2Agent (A2A) use case for developers** — not just another personal AI assistant, but actual *multi-agent coordination* that syncs your dev workflow without manual input.

What it does:

* **Sync GitHub activity**: Agents pull your commits, PRs, and issues
* **Auto-schedule focus time**: Calendar agent plans smart blocks around your priorities
* **Remind you where it matters**: Another agent pings you via Slack/email — “You haven’t committed in 3 days” or “Focus block for PR review starts soon"
* **Update your docs**: Agents detect relevant changes and help auto-update project documentation

Why it matters: A2A systems are the next leap after AI copilots — instead of giving you suggestions, they collaborate behind the scenes to get stuff done.

We’d love to get your feedback:

* Would you use something like this to try A2A?
* What use case would *you* automate first?
* What’s missing for this to be useful in your week?

Thanks in advance — open to all feedback!

https://redd.it/1kn9d7c
@r_devops

Started 30 Days 30 DevOps Project - Day 1

Started this to push myself with working projects. Will update you guys along the way. Primary focus is on Kubernetes and Docker Containerisation with CI/CD.

Day 1: CI/CD DevOps Pipeline Project: Deployment of Java Application on Kubernetes

https://redd.it/1knalo7
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Best ways to reducing cloud costs?

Besides having good architecture from the start, and stopping short of redesigning it..

How are companies reducing cloud hosting and monitoring costs these days?

https://redd.it/1kncef1
@r_devops

Ai debugging, troubleshooting

AI, debugging and troubleshooting

Hello,
I’m Junior Devops (2months exp without previous it exp). I use AI to explaining me tasks, debugging and troubleshooting. I use it to keep up with complexity of project (i know only basics about terraform, azure, powrrshell) is it good approach ? I know it would be better to Google or something but to be honest i need to keep up and they don’t give me tasks for juniors (XD when i wrote powrshell with claude, and they saw it they said that they could not make it themself because they thought its easy task but after time they saw thats really hard but i have almost finished it with help of ai and explanation) do You have some resources with short tasks to learn troubleshooting and debugging (what do you Think about sadservers?). Where i can learn how to read logs ? Or something ?

https://redd.it/1kndv04
@r_devops

I made an API that automates the art of avoiding responsibility [OC]

Tired of saying "it works on my machine"? Meet Blame-as-a-Service: the API that turns "my bad" into "cosmic rays hit the server."

Some masterpieces it has generated:

* "Mercury is in retrograde, which affected our database queries"
* "The intern thought 'rm -rf /' was a cleaning command"
* "Our AI pair programmer became sentient and decided it didn't like that feature"

Now I can break the build with confidence.

[https://github.com/sbmagar13/blame-as-a-service](https://github.com/sbmagar13/blame-as-a-service)

**Edit:** *This post was written by my cat walking across the keyboard.*

https://redd.it/1knckc0
@r_devops

Preparing for My First DevOps Interview – What Should I Expect as a Fresher?

I have my first DevOps interview scheduled for next week, and I’m both excited and a bit anxious. As someone who’s just starting out, I’ve been learning the basics—Linux, shell scripting, CI/CD pipelines, version control, and cloud fundamentals—but I’m unsure about the depth and type of questions that are typically asked for a fresher DevOps role.
If you’ve been through the process recently or have experience interviewing freshers, I’d really appreciate your insights:
•What kind of technical questions should I expect?
•Are there common tools or concepts interviewers generally focus on?
•How important are scripting and problem-solving skills at this stage?
•Any non-technical areas I should prepare for?

I’m genuinely passionate about DevOps and eager to learn and grow in this field. Any tips, experiences, or resources you can share would mean a lot.

https://redd.it/1kndscq
@r_devops

Did we get scammed?

We hired someone at my work a couple months back. For a DevOps-y role. Nominally software engineer. Put them through a lot of the interview questions we give to devs. They aced it. Never seen a better interview. We hired them. Now, their work output is abysmal. They seem to have lied to us about working on a set of tasks for a project and basically made no progress in the span of weeks. I don't think it is an onboarding issue, we gave them plenty of time to get situated and familiar with our environment, I don't think it is a communication issue, we were very clear on what we expected.

But they just... didn't do anything. My question is: is this some sort of scam in the industry, where someone just tries to get hired then does no work and gets fired a couple months later? This person has an immigrant visa for reference.

https://redd.it/1knhshw
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Restrict org creation

Hello
Can a azure global admin modify the azure devops policy to prevent new organizations creation or do I need the devops admin role?

https://redd.it/1knjclh
@r_devops

What to expect from setting up Backstage

At my company we have a team that is working with 6 FTE on setting up Backstage. They hired some capable developers to work this out.

We have a varied landscape but it’s not super complicated to integrate with. There are some pipeline building blocks for hard to access services and self service forms in service now. Apart from that we have Azure, Azure DevOps and AWS, and quite some software running on Kubernetes.

This team is currently working for over 18 months and so far have not gone really live with it. There is basic integration with Entra ID over a plug-in, the same with Azure DevOps also over a plug-in, there are a couple of paved roads that basically scaffold you a repository with a bunch of code to own in a preselected framework, e.g. nextJS, and there is no integration with Kubernetes or CrossPlane. There is a nice GUI that is basically empty. There is no further content and it’s unfortunately barely used at the moment.

All of this really made me wonder about Backstage as a framework. When reading the docs this seems simple enough to set up. Is embracing Backstage really so time consuming? Are there serious flaws in the framework or philosophy? How was Backstage used in your company or department, if it was embraced at all, and what value did it bring you? This information might help me understand why it’s worth the effort in continuing this implementation and what as a developer I could get out of a Backstage implementation myself.

https://redd.it/1knkmpm
@r_devops

My first app on Glide. Good idea?

Hi! I just came up with an idea for a Q&A app, and although I have zero experience in app development, I do know a bit about programming in other languages since I’m a Data Analyst. My question is: is starting with Glide a good idea for the beta phase of the project, or do you have any recommendations?

Anything else I should consider? I’m currently in the planning and design phase of my app.

Thanks in advance and best regards.

https://redd.it/1knj3k8
@r_devops

Getting to the final round of interviews only to be passed over for the other candidate feels bad.

I didn't receive any particular feedback that said why, but if I had to guess it's because I'm in a larger city, where the cost of living necessitates a higher salary so I was asking for the higher end of what they were offering. But that's pure speculation. Could be the other candidate was just more qualified too.

Either way, it sucks. I've been out of work for months trying to find something. I really, REALLY don't want to work for defense contractors, but they're some of the only people in my state that are hiring and paying, and it's also mostly in-office (or all in-office).

I'll just keep looking until I find something, but yeah feelsbadman

https://redd.it/1knn56d
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How do you approach opentelemetry traces, metrics and logs for Local/CI envs in your day-to-day work? Looking to exchange experiences.

Hello Folks,

I'm working in a project and I'm helping the team to instrument the services in way that it can help the devs to get more insight about what their code is doing and also OPS teams to get understanding on what is happening on the CI side from time to time.

Of course I could just push the money printer button and just use Datadog or something similar, but I'm thinking about the dev experience using local (opensource) tools.

In the past, I've used the following tools:

* OpenSearch: dataprepper + opensearch, requires one configuration file but you get hit by \~1.5GB memory usage;
* Grafana Labs: Grafana +Alloy + Tempo + Loki + Prometheus works but requires more configuration.

The thing is: when something fails, devs have problems to identify what component or microservice that is part the observability stack failed, some doesnt even knows that something is not working.

So I'm trying to improve the situation above and of course, maybe someone can call it hair splitting ... but currently I maybe found the most lightweight setup that I could've ask:

* davetron5000/otel-desktop-viewer + prometheus + dozzle: prometheus has now an otlp receiver and the otel-desktop-viewer is simple: no need to setup otelcol or something else. Dozzle for logs.

The solution above doesn't have any kind of correlation but its really light weight: if you can't see the traces interface, recreate the container; same goes for prometheus metrics.

With the above in mind, I'd like to ask:

What is the toolset that you employ to the scenario above? What do you like more about it?

Thanks in advance.

https://redd.it/1knqptx
@r_devops

Common pattern of success.

Good evening, fellow engineers.

Tonight I’ve been reflecting on everything that’s been happening to me and of course I know I’m not alone. Every one of us has a story. Joy, pain, burnout, moments of pride, periods of depression, wins and losses. Life hits us all.
So here’s my honest question to the truly SUCCESSFUL, GROUNDED, and BRILLIANT engineers in this space:
What’s your recipe? What keeps you moving forward even when mentally, emotionally, or spiritually you’re completely drained with all kind of life circumstances- family, society etc.

I’m not some kid with wide-eyed wonder asking a feel-good, cliche question. I’m an adult who’s been in and still is in a never-ending grind. But at some point, I just have to ask: how? What’s the actual difference between someone who breaks through and someone who stays stuck, looping in the same spiral for years?

Let’s put aside the motivational quotes and hustle porn etc. There must be something real, something practical and shared that unites those who consistently get through the fog and stay on the path.

So what are your biggest struggles when it comes to your career? How do you overcome them day in, day out? What patterns or mindsets you guys have that actually move you forward?

P.S to folks with high sense of humor: I’m all for humor and good energy, but this one matters so pls let’s keep it real. This could genuinely help a lot of people who are stuck in silence right now.

https://redd.it/1knsu0y
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