We’re Part of the Founding Engineering Team at groundcover!

Hey 👋 We’re here to chat about all things cloud-native observability! This post will run from May 19-23, so jump in and ask away. No topic is off-limits.

# Who We Are

We’re part of the founding engineering team at groundcover, building a modern, cloud-native observability platform that’s redefining how teams monitor and troubleshoot applications in Kubernetes environments.

Our engineering efforts focus on:

Building high-performance, low-overhead observability tool powered by eBPF
Leveraging a unique Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC) architecture to shift-left costs and privacy with no infrastructure markups
Tackling real-world troubleshooting challenges in large-scale, distributed cloud environments
Making observability fast, accessible, and seamless — for managed and self-hosted cloud environments
Developing zero-instrumentation solutions to give engineers immediate, out-of-box actionable insights

We also run an active [Slack community](https://app.slack.com/huddle/T03ELGQ5J2W/C03ELGQ6Y2E) and updated [Docs](https://docs.groundcover.com/) for devs, SREs, and cloud enthusiasts to discuss cloud monitoring, eBPF, OpenTelemetry, and more. Feel free to join!

\--

About Us

Noam Levy — Field CTO @groundcoverI’m a Field CTO and part of groundcover’s founding engineering team. For the past decade, I’ve led engineering groups focused on building microservices-based web applications, optimizing complex application pipelines, and tackling system engineering challenges at scale.

Aviv Zohari — Field CTO @groundcoverI’m a Field CTO and founding engineer at groundcover, I work on eBPF-based observability solutions. My passion lies in deeply understanding how software systems behave in the wild and designing tools that make monitoring them simple and efficient. Previously, I worked as a security researcher breaking weird machines for a living.

\---

# What We'll Cover

We’re here to talk about the cloud monitoring and observability landscape, including:

Exploring the power of eBPF in Kubernetes
Kubernetes troubleshooting: how to fix common issues
Troubleshooting cloud-native apps, including the most frequent errors
Next-gen microservice architecture trends
On-prem observability considerations
BYOC (Bring Your Own Cloud) — what it means and when it makes sense
OpenTelemetry and eBPF: everything you need to know
AI Agents and Observability — what’s coming next
OpenTelemetry: benefits, challenges, and best practices

…and anything else you’d like to throw at us!

We’ll help unpack the most interesting observability trends, tradeoffs, and challenges in 2025, and share what we’re seeing out there in the wild.

Let’s dive into your questions!



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

What’s your “I’m definitely a cloud person now” moment?

For me, it was when I caught myself saying things like “I’ll just spin up an environment real quick” while making coffee at 7am.

Or the time I set lifecycle rules for my personal Google Drive after spending a week with S3 policies 😂

It’s weird how cloud thinking just... seeps into your brain.
What was your moment?
When did you realize cloud had officially taken over your brain?

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

Read-only Fridays led to creating Neofetch for Terraform

My boss advocates for dedicating specific hours each week to learning new, fulfilling, and interesting topics. We’ve implemented read-only Fridays, where we allocate a few hours in the morning or afternoon to acquire new skills that pique our interest. Personally, I’ve been on a side quest to enhance my Go skills. So this past Friday, I decided to experiment with a seemingly useless but enjoyable tool to add some flair to our infra repositories. It’s called Terrafetch (Neofetch for Terraform), which implements a straightforward terminal interface that provides statistics on various aspects of our infrastructure, including variables, outputs, providers, modules, and documentation. I highly recommend adopting a similar structure where team members can allocate time for learning. It keeps things fresh and spicy. If you’re interested in Terrafetch, here’s the repository: here’s the repository.

https://redd.it/1kqdr38
@r_devops

The DevOps Skills Score Card

Ive been doing some hard-core skill analysis and made this to help me find my weak spots.

Figured I should go ahead and share it. Let me know what you think!

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1QT2iUlLlt9R44U4lsTL0u5rOC\_Cr\_zuYLYAazp-2oA8/edit?usp=sharing

edit: lol, I misspelled score card.. whatever, Im keeping it.

https://redd.it/1kqj76j
@r_devops

Terraform MCP Server and other announcements

https://github.com/hashicorp/terraform-mcp-server

A bunch of Azure stuff in here which I don't really understand much https://www.hashicorp.com/en/blog/hashicorp-microsoft-build-2025-automate-secure-scale-on-azure



https://redd.it/1kqpp54
@r_devops

Task executor with "friendly" UI

We have automations all over the place and we're looking into centralizing into anything. We're trying to hit the points of HA (if it's self hosted), if cloud have an agent or some way to run scripts in network so we can run scripts on prem, SSO/SAML /w RBAC, able to run python /w libraries/etc, have a rest api so we can remotely start jobs, tell us if something went wrong, etc. While this would be for us I would love it if there was a non-scary UI so internal people can run jobs.

I've been casually looking for a month and it looks like I have three categories: holy hell there goes my kidney (e.g. runbook/process automation that has a yearly fee and per user licensing), low code solutions that I'm not confident will work with much of the custom logic we'd want to do and is consumption based [we have mssql and use dynamic ports, so all those query mssql actions? Ya those don't work.\] (e.g. azure logic apps, n8n), on prem solutions that miss one or more of the major points (argo workflows [worried it's complex enough to make an automation that people won't use it, comparing to aws lambda\], awx [locks us into ansible\], jenkins [technically does everything but we're actively trying to kill these off so I don't want to make another one if possible\], rundeck [no HA, SSO if one is willing to hack it a bit...but i don't want to rely on hacking things together\]).

We have budget, but I don't have $25K/yr + more for users. I'm leery on using consumption based because I'd want to put the monitors we have in that system that trigger every min or two. Is there something you guys have used that fits this or am I being unrealistic?

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

Career Advice

So i am in IT and having a hard time choosing a major to focus on i am currently trying to focus on cloud and unix because cloud(Azure) really in demand in canada and Unix is my strongest cuz i have spent more time on it so i am choosing both which are essential for devops is this good? i hate networking and cybersecurity is secondary

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

CS grad who interned as a network engineer looking for next step

Hi just graduated a couple weeks ago and am now trying to continue learning as i apply for jobs. My goal is to work in the cloud engineer or devops space and right now i want to learn more about devops. In my capstone we worked with azure devops for version control and I interned as a NE last summer. ( im applying for everything from developer to network to data science type roles, but my desired field is devops i believe. as i feel it incorporates alot of what i learn vs being hyper focused)

Right now im considering either purchasing continuous delivery by jez hamble , or jumping straight into making a beginner/intermediate CICD pipeline following a tutorial , or doing one of those free code camp devops programs, focusing on what i don't know.

Any recommendations on what my best use of time would be?

https://redd.it/1kqrk79
@r_devops

How to interview experienced people?

I have to interview people with 3-4YOE.

What should i ask them? Should I ask them targeted questions on things we use. Questions which one should know if they really have used the tools.

Like IAM policies and cross account access, S3 resource policies, etc. And Ansible or Terraform basics like commands, underlying logic, etc.

And what should I ask them on Kubernetes? How to judge someone and send them to the next round?

The real challenge is when candidate resume mentions things that I have 0 idea. How should I ask such a candidate and judge them on their technical skills?

https://redd.it/1kqwxc9
@r_devops

I made a TUI for OpenTofu (Terraform) provider registry

If you're like me, when developing terraform code, you often switch to your browser and then google "terraform aws provider" or "terraform github provider" to browse available resources, their documentation, versions etc. I hated that workflow and decided to fix it by creating a TUI that interacts with OpenTofu registry API (still compatible with Terraform). Now whether you are a VIM, VSCode or IntelliJ user, you can use the terminal that's always nearby to look up exactly what you need.

GitHub: https://github.com/djetelina/tofuref
PyPi: https://pypi.org/project/tofuref/


Any feedback and suggestions are appreciated, while I was content enough with the current state to release it as 1.0, I'm sure there's more this tool could do :)

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

Feeling lost - dont know what to do with my career

Hi guys,
I am writing this post, as I am lost what to do with my career.

Small backgroud:
I am 23, and 3 years ago, just after my first year at university, I started internship in a big company, as I wanted to quickly gain some experience and internships at my collage are obligatory anyway (studing Telecomunnication engineering/CS).
As I was really devoted to the internship (Python developer), I took every extra task possible and tried to help with every interesting topic in sight, got very positive feedback and I stayed in.
With time my job quickly gravitated towards DevOps, more responsibilities, while still studing full time.

And here I am, after 3 years of studing full time, while in breaks between one lecture and another logging to dailes and meetings, spending all my spare time doing homeworks after work or doing work after day at university.
I berely finished my degree, after extending it for a half a year.
Now, after pursuing my master for half a year, I will probably start it again, as I failed most of exams already.
Things which used to be fun, now are only a chore, I have to force myself to study anything after 8 hours at work. Even things that used to interest me.

Now I am staring at another failed pipeline in terraform, wondering how did I finished here. Something that was supposed to be quick internship, ended in being full time career.
But here is a trap which I dont know how to deal with: the job is well paid, much more then any of my collegues from uni do, the team is fine and I am really appriciated here. The problem is, I dont really like this kind of job, I always wanted to do something more "interesting" and this job is quite frustrating (continous debugging, fixing pipelines and waiting ages for someone to do his tasks to unblock me (big company)).

I am feeling lost with next steps:

1. Taking some loooong break, and focusing on uni.
2. Trying to focus on job, hoping it will get better with more free time (but I am not sure if I will ever go for master degree if I skip it now...), maybe DevOps isnt that bad and I will regret changing career in future?
3. Trying to join company focused on my interest (space exploration, also programming) which I am after first rounds of interview and waiting for decision. Catch is, its half a salary which I make here.

https://redd.it/1kr0a51
@r_devops

Similar to cold start problem

My spring boot application is taking 120s to start, When a new pod gets spawned up in kubernetes cluster.

So, I have to include the readiness probe. Which is slow downing the load testing.

am I missing something here. can the spring application start can happen beforehead?

https://redd.it/1kqxx9u
@r_devops

Built something to monitor and forecast API usage across providers like OpenAI — curious if other DevOps folks face this pain

Hey all,

I’ve been working on a side project to deal with a challenge I ran into while building with LLM APIs — tracking and forecasting usage across providers like OpenAI and Anthropic. Especially when running workloads at scale, it’s easy to lose visibility into token consumption, cost spikes, or quota limits.

The tool I’m building:
• Monitors real-time usage (tokens, credits, endpoint data)
• Alerts when you hit certain thresholds (like 80% of quota)
• Forecasts future usage based on historical trends
• And checks if providers are up/down before your workflows break

Would love to know:
Do any of you manage LLM or third-party API usage this way?
What tooling do you use today to keep track of spend and reliability?

Not trying to pitch anything — just genuinely curious how others are solving this in a DevOps environment, especially when infra teams are told to “make sure OpenAI doesn’t break production” 🙃

If you’re interested, I’m happy to share a link in the comments so you can try it out and give feedback. Thanks!

https://redd.it/1kr222o
@r_devops

Anybody here built their own K8s operator? If so, what was the use case?

I’m trying to expand my K8s knowledge and Go skills by figuring out some good use cases for creating my own operator.

So far, the only thing I could come up with is an operator that analyzes cluster event logs and offers up a report for security improvements leveraging AI API.

I would like to find something a bit more practical though.

https://redd.it/1kr2twg
@r_devops

Are my requests for compensation unreasonable?

Hello!

Looking to jump ship on a failing startup. I have 3.5 yrs of intimate DevOps experience and another 7ish with traditional Sysadmin/DBA knowledge. I'm the main IC of our team and also leading/managing. I'm looking for a new role. Senior Devops, SRE or Cloud Platform and my asks are:

* $170k or more (realistically it's a starting point and I would probably go down to $150k)
* 100% Remote
* Also my kube experience is somewhat limited outside of EKS :/

Am I asking for the world when I'm really not worth that? Have not got a lot of traction on applications so far.

Here's a snip from my resume:

```
Core Competencies

Infrastructure Platforms: AWS, GCP, Linode, On-Premise & Co-Located Data Centers
IaC: Terraform, Terragrunt, CloudFormation, Ansible, Packer, AWS CLI/SDK
Monitoring & Observability: Datadog, Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, OpenSearch, ELK stack
Scripting & Automation: Python, Golang, Java, Bash, Lambda, Step Functions
Orchestration: EKS, Docker, Rancher, Helm, AWS ECS
CI/CD: CircleCI, GitHub Actions, AWS CodePipeline/Deploy/Build, Elastic Beanstalk, AWX, Packer
Web & Runtime Environments: Apache, PHP, Nginx, Traefik
Databases: PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB, MSSQL, Oracle
Data Tools: Airflow (Astronomer), Snowflake, dbt
Compliance & Security: PCI, SOC2, AWS WAF, Cloudflare, Apache ModSecurity

Professional Experience
DevOps Engineering Manager | Oct 2024 – Present
DevOps Engineer | March 2022 – Oct 2024

Led and designed a full-scale cloud migration from a legacy hosting provider to AWS, establishing a secure, scalable multi-account architecture to support long-term growth and compliance.

Broke apart a tightly coupled monolith into containerized microservices deployed via Amazon ECS, improving deployment speed, fault isolation, and scalability.

Enabled developer self-service and infrastructure consistency by authoring reusable, opinionated Terraform modules for AWS resources.

Automated previously manual deployments by orchestrating CI/CD pipelines across CircleCI, GitHub Actions, and AWX, improving delivery speed and reliability.

Replaced a costly third-party WAF/CDN with a fully managed AWS WAF and CloudFront solution, saving over $125,000 annually without compromising security posture.

Reduced operational toil and unblocked engineering teams by writing targeted automation (scripts, Lambdas, monitoring hooks) to bridge platform gaps and streamline workflows.

Championed observability, compliance, and performance tuning efforts across dev, staging, and production environments, supporting both legacy systems and modern stacks.
```

https://redd.it/1kr4fia
@r_devops

Upcoming Grad wanting to get into Cloud or DevOps - I need resume help

Hey everyone!

I'm currently set to obtain a degree in Computer Science (Cloud Computing specialization) from my college, as I sought to direct my career trajectory towards IT roles related to cloud and DevOps (i.e. Cloud Support, SWE, DevOps Engineer, SRE, DevSecOps Engineer, etc.). Throughout my time, I've undertaken multiple projects that involved specific tools used by professionals (Terraform, Jenkins, Kubernetes, ArgoCD, AWS services, Prometheus, Grafana, etc.) or involved building different types of cloud infrastructures and web applications. I've added these projects to my resume which ran up to 2 pages, so I condensed it down to one page:

Resume: Current Resume

It's tough to gauge what the job market is right now, but it seems as though it's quite tough to land interviews, despite the experience listed on my resume. For some reason, I feel as though both my work and project experiences appear to be... unimpressive, which has been pushing me to undertake more complex projects and even consider taking AWS certification exams. Networking is admittedly tough for me as well. The projects I've done were generally done with web servers launched from AWS, so I've been gradually rebuilding them so that I can include them in my GitHub repos.

Ultimately, I just feel stuck. I know resumes always have room for improvement, so I think there certainly must be something wrong (or hindering) my resume. Can anyone help review my resume and share any suggestions, insights, or critiques you have? I would absolutely appreciate any advice!

https://redd.it/1kr2tr5
@r_devops

backup for local code devs might lose?

before pushing to staging, which is authorized by mr. big boss, these guys work on trillion branches, which i assume is bad practice to push to the non CI branches...seems like too crowded for the repo.

what happened is that one of our devs accidentally erased all his local files(git stash pop).

we've went over his flow - that he should first do git stash apply, and then garbage dispose at the end of the day manually. but these things can happen still.


so if you can offer some best practices?

what i know so far

1)git bundle, not sure exactly how to use.

2) repo for backup for devs, without the whole code of the app-for tenacity/contain sensitive code.

3) simply toss non CI branches to the usual repo..



https://redd.it/1kr747f
@r_devops

Is there demand in Europe for a tool that scans Kubernetes clusters for security and inefficiency?

I'm an engineer working on an idea for a new tool aimed at European companies running Kubernetes.

The goal is to automatically surface both security issues and inefficiencies in clusters. Things like overly permissive RBAC, missing network policies, or unsafe pod configurations. But also unused configmaps, idle workloads, or resource waste from overprovisioning.

Most of the tools I see today are US-based, which in the current light of day can feel uneasy for european companies. E.g., looking at what happened with Microsoft banning accounts. What I have in mind is something you can self-host or run in a European cloud, with more focus on actionable findings and EU Privacy Laws.

I’m curious:
\- What do you currently use to monitor this?
\- Is this even a real problem in your day-to-day?
\- Would you consider paying for something like this, or do you prefer building these checks in-house?

Happy to hear any and all feedback. Especially if you think this is already solved. That’s valuable input too.

https://redd.it/1krc7w5
@r_devops

What tools do you use for adhoc remote execution?

Question mainly concerned with cloud native deployments but could extend to onprem. For context, we have thousands of k8s and compute instances running in all public clouds, but this concerns orgs of any nontrivial scale.

Often in the course of automated or manual incident response, we'll want to run some (potentially distributed) operation, e.g.:

all clusters running workloadA --> execute shell command in a chosen pod, and potentially do something with the output (think lightweight dag workflow)
in all k8s where cluster name matches some pattern --> rollout restart sts in namespaceY
instances where cpu > 90% --> generate diagnostics and push to s3
list configmaps in aws us-east-1 with updated >= 7d

TLDR: query engine + workflow engine for cloud environments.

What tool(s) are you using to solve this? If vendored (Datadog Workflow Automation, PD Runbook Automation), is your team happy with it?

https://redd.it/1krdlb9
@r_devops

Discussion: On running Cypress tests when code is currently split into multiple repos (frontend and backend) & also for each pull request from those repos

Hello,

I am trying to fulfill a technical design requirement and I think I have a way but want to ask here (hoping I can find better options):

Current setup: I have a frowned and backend repos and the code gets deployed on k8s cluster and then we update Cypress with the Ingress URL (post frontend and backend with ingress) for running the tests.

We use GitHub Action Workflows as our CI (And ArgoCD as CD, which is not a topic in this conversation)

Ask: We need ephemeral env's where for each PR (from either repos), we want the cypress to run. But, in order for cypress to run it needs a working both frontend and backend (with ingress) to run in order to run the end-to-end tests.

What I came up with here is:

* For each PR (for example frontend PR), I can label with the {pr\_name} and deploy a copy of the backend deployment and pass the payload to cypress and vice-versa.
* But with this approach, I need to add the kustomize yaml files of both frontend and backend into my GitHub Action workflows in the Cypress tests.
* Is this the best approach? Can I make it better than this approach?



**On the side (I also):**

I also have a working CI/CD integration with these separate repos, where when there is a PR created, I have a CI in those repos to handover the build docker sha to the kustomize modules repo and in that repo, I have an argocd Pull Request Generator waiting for it to consume it and deploy a new namespace based on the PR\_LABEL that I abreast set.



I am all ears on how the community approached this design setups 🙋🏻‍♂️🙋🏻‍♂️

Cheers!!

https://redd.it/1krf463
@r_devops

Need feedback on "Fantastic Job Finder 2000"

Hey r/devops,

I've been looking for work for almost a year now, and out of utter boredom, hacked together a tiny open-source "tool" (if you could call it that):

Parses a YAML profile → searches boards, google etc. → asks ChatGPT to re-order a résumé for each posting
Keeps facts honest by only re-phrasing what’s in the YAML,
Spits out an ATS-friendly Markdown/PDF.
Digs up any dirt it can find on a company and advises of it. Layoffs, high turnover, displeasure with management, etc.

Repo: **https://github.com/vsysio-bgould/jobhunt**

I’d love eyes on the prompt design / YAML schema.

What’s missing for a DevOps résumé?
Too opinionated on cloud separation? Would I even be considered for an Azure role, seeing as I only know AWS?
Ideas to slap a UI on this thing?
YAML make sense for this prompt?

Since I've been using it, my response rate has gone up ten-fold. I've had 3 interviews this week already. I was lucky to get one a month before.

And yeah, I know the name is cheesy. I'm bad with names.

Has anybody tried this approach before for their job search? Any suggestions to improve it?

Also, does it make sense for me to keep excluding US jobs, since I'm Canadian? Since all this tariffs nonsense began, I've had exactly 0 US employers or recruiters reach out to me, despite representing about 300+ applications.

https://redd.it/1krfws2
@r_devops