SecretZero — Git-native secrets-as-code for bootstrapping and managing project secrets

I've been working on **SecretZero**, an open-source tool to solve a problem most DevOps teams eventually run into:

>How do you bootstrap, document, rotate, and reproduce all the secrets required to run an application without relying on tribal knowledge and manual steps?

SecretZero uses declarative manifests to define a project's secret requirements and helps automate:

* Initial secret generation and seeding
* Secret synchronization across providers
* Rotation tracking and lifecycle management
* Git-friendly auditing and documentation of secret state
* Multi-environment workflows
* Contextless agent secret handling

The goal is to make secrets a first-class part of your infrastructure lifecycle instead of a collection of undocumented values hidden across vaults, CI systems, and environment files without additional infrastructure.

It also includes integrations for modern workflows, including MCP support for tooling that needs controlled access to secret metadata, multiple environments, and an optional on-demand, one-time use web UI.

I'd love feedback from the DevOps/SRE community:

* How are you handling "secret zero" today?
* Do you have a repeatable process for bootstrapping new environments?
* Are your secrets documented, rotated, and auditable?

Repo: [https://github.com/zloeber/secretzero](https://github.com/zloeber/secretzero)

This is an early project that I wrote for my own needs and use daily — feedback, criticism, and ideas welcome!

https://redd.it/1v9w4o6
@r_devops

Devops project as a fresher?

What is the best devops project you made as a fresher from college..

Mine was end to end devops project of a Ecom site --

Infra with terraform, CICD with DevSecOps pipeline in GitHub action, GKE for kubernetes, Gitops with ArgoCD (also this one got me hired back then)

What is your best project would love to hear from fresher perspective..

https://redd.it/1v9z0v9
@r_devops

agentic incident response actually saved me at 11pm last week

6 person team, i carry the pager most weeks cuz nobody else wants it. last tuesday 11pm i get paged, payment latency climbing, checkouts timing out. normally this is me sitting up in bed squinting at grafana half asleep for 15 min trying to find what changed



this time i had an agent wired into our runbook stuff and just let it run. it pulled recent deploys, correlated the error logs against the deploy timeline, and pointed at a connection pool config that got shrunk in a PR that afternoon. like 90 seconds, and it was right



what got me is that same PR had already been flagged that day by coderabbit / bugbot for the exact config value, and we waved it through cuz it was a rushed merge before someone's flight. the warning was sitting right there, we ignored it, and the agent rediscovered it later on. i rolled back from my phone and went back to sleep



i dont fully trust it solo though. its confidently pointed at the wrong deploy before when two things shipped close together, so i read it then verify myself. fast first pass, not a decision maker



anyone letting an agent do remediation on its own yet or you all keeping a human in the loop like me

https://redd.it/1va0x5k
@r_devops

Looking for guidance on choosing programming language

Hello everyone I was working as Devops engineer , Currently I was targetting FAANG companies moving forward, I choose python as my primary scripting language I won't say I do well in python just know the basics and AI to generate it my logic and I validate it never coded anything like leetcide problems

Since I was targetting FAANG I was looking to learn DSA in either ways I need to start learning programing language I was confused whether to pic python or JAVA can anyone have any suggestions it will be useful for me to plan my path

https://redd.it/1v9ykus
@r_devops

I just gave an company's OA and just got rigged, help me with these questions below. Are they really for a fresher in devops?

Application version manager

ABC is on a sprint spree and their development team is continuously rolling out new features and fixing bugs. The DevOps team now needs to ensure that the app updates are installed correctly for every user.

Write a bash script that takes in the user’s current version preferably as a parameter, fetches all the versions which have database updates serially from a separate text file, and lists out the versions which need to be updated.

Version format: major.minor.patch (eg- 2.5.23)

Part 1

Write a bash script where the current version and the latest version do not have a major update. Only minor versions or patch may vary.

Eq- current version is 2.5.23, and latest version is 2.6.0

Part 2

In the same bash script file as for part 1 of the question, include changes so that it identifies changes in major version if any.

Eq- current version is 2.5.23, and latest version is 3.1.2

Input

versions.txt (see filetree)

Output

If current version is 3.1.1

3.1.6

3.1.13

If current version is 3.1.2

3.1.6

3.1.13

If current version is 2.1.9

2.1.10

2.1.11

2.1.18

2.2.0

2.2.10

2.2.20

2.4.5

3.1.0

3.1.1

3.1.6

3.1.13

https://redd.it/1va32l4
@r_devops

From Oil field to DevOps is it possible?

Background: I'm an engineer in Algeria. My degree is in electrical/automation and I currently work in oil & gas as a data acquisition engineer (well testing, data integrity, reporting, that kind of thing). About a year ago, I decided to pivot into a remote role because I've been facing a health condition where on-site/field and mostly any physically demanding work is no longer an option for me. Cloud/DevOps is the direction I chose because I like the work and it's the most realistic path I found to stable remote work that pays in USD or EUR

What I've done so far:

Finished my AWS Cloud Practitioner prep, and I'm about to sit the exam ( scored 85-90% on most mocks, been stuck on a dumb payment/booking issue, but it's coming)
Linux fundamentals, wrote a few bash scripts and put them on GitHub
Hands-on AWS labs in my own account: built VPCs with public/private subnets, security groups vs NACLs, IAM, a two-tier setup with a private RDS MySQL behind an ALB, S3 gateway endpoints, etc. Broke things on purpose to learn how they fail
Currently grinding through Terraform. Kubernetes and more Python are next

Here's where the doubt kicks in. When I actually read job postings, two things hit me:

1. Almost every "junior" role still wants 1 to 3 years of real experience
2. Basically every remote role is geo-locked. "Remote (US only)," "must be authorized to work in X," no sponsorship, etc. The genuinely hire-from-anywhere jobs feel rare

So my question to people actually working in this field: am I chasing something that barely exists for someone in my situation? Or is the hire-from-anywhere market real if you're good enough and know where to look? And if you've done this from outside the US/EU, how did you actually break in?

I like the work, that's not the issue. I just don't want to spend another 6 months on a door that won't open.

TLDR: Non-US engineer pivoting into cloud. Made decent progress but every remote role wants experience + local presence. Is this realistic or am I fooling myself?

https://redd.it/1va7smw
@r_devops

How does your team handle documentation

I'm doing research on how documentation is done in different DevOps teams. What processes exist? How is it valued within your team? Has AI made that better or worse? Are there tools that you use to make it easier (not talking about Confluence here)? If you hqve worked in a professional context then I'd love to hear your input.

Considering the huge amount of shill posts I want to disclose that I'm (considering) making a tool that helps with documentation but I'm still in the process of understanding this problem thoroughly, which is why I'm askibg for your input :)

https://redd.it/1va6r9f
@r_devops

Is anyone burnt out?

Maybe it’s because I haven’t taken a proper vacation in lord know long.

I don’t handle k8s, but I work with a containerized environment and pipelines etc. But with the speed everything seems to be going, and the constant push, I feel overwhelmed and just want nothing to do with technology…maybe I just need to step away for a bit…how are you guys dealing with this. Talking to other devops folks, looks like they too are drinking from the fire hydrant

https://redd.it/1vabhl6
@r_devops

Would you still do DevOps?

Not going to lie. It's been a bad day. I almost tell them "take this job and shove it' after reviewing all these crappy AI codes. Vibe coding is not only a joke. It's a monster that mocks our hard-earned experiences!

I am thinking of leaving the industry! If you could go back ten years from now and know what you're knowing right now, would you still do DevOps?



https://redd.it/1val3ha
@r_devops

Can I transition from a BPO job to DevOps?

Hi everyone,

I'm a 2025 Computer Science graduate from India. I'm struggling to get an IT support or infrastructure support job mainly because my spoken English isn't very strong, even though I can troubleshoot issues practically.

I'm considering joining a BPO (technical support/chat support) for financial stability while continuing to learn Linux, Git, Docker, AWS, Kubernetes, and DevOps after work.

Has anyone here transitioned from BPO or technical support into DevOps or cloud roles? How difficult was it, and what roadmap or advice would you recommend?

I'd really appreciate hearing your experiences.

https://redd.it/1vani6a
@r_devops

How you guys are avoiding tying to any specific GPU vendor for AI workloads?

With more and more teams using LLMs and inference services wondering how everyone is making decisions about their infrastructure like are you choosing one major cloud provider, using Kubernetes across multiple providers or trying platforms like RunPod, CoreWeave, Yotta Labs, Lambda to keep things flexible?

more interested in whether anyone has found a real way to move workloads between different GPU providers without having to maintain completely separate deployment processes.

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

How do experienced teams answer "What changed?" during a production incident?

I've been curious how different teams approach this in practice.

Imagine you're on call and something in production starts behaving differently. It's not immediately obvious whether it's a deployment, infrastructure change, configuration change, scaling event, cloud service issue, or something else.

Once the alert fires, how do you actually answer questions like:

What changed?

When did it change?

Was the change intentional?

What's the fastest way to confirm the root cause?

I'm less interested in the tools themselves (Terraform, Kubernetes, CloudTrail, Grafana, etc.) and more interested in the actual investigation workflow that experienced engineers follow.

For example:

Where do you usually look first?

Which sources of truth do you trust the most?

What part of the investigation tends to consume the most time?

Are there still manual steps that you wish were easier?

I'm trying to understand how this is handled in real production environments, especially at companies running on AWS/Kubernetes.

Thanks in advance—I’m hoping to learn from people who've been through enough incidents to know what actually works.

https://redd.it/1vatqr6
@r_devops

How many of you went multi-cloud, or switched cloud providers entirely, for a new job?

I have spent most of my career in AWS, but more and more, I am seeing companies asking for skill sets with multiple cloud providers. I feel like the skill set is transferable; if you know how to spin up EKS then spinning up a GKE cluster shouldn't be that much different. It's still Kubernetes under the hood, still installing helm charts, still using cluster autoscaler to provision new nodes, still installing Argo CD via Helm along with Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, etc. All that changes are the resources used and modules on the Terraform/cloud provider level. Am I correct in thinking this or am I way off base here?

https://redd.it/1vazyx8
@r_devops

Formalising methods whilst keeping it informal as a small business mentality

I was employed by a business because they're growing. I need some advice, because part of making changes in company processes is changing ways of thinking. I've helped introduce new frameworks but they seem to be reluctant to change their processes, which makes it difficult to do my job.

I don't want to overstep the mark or looking like I'm overruling/ignoring them

For example, my manager and I have different ideas about approaches to developing a solution. Most of our work where we have different ideas is writing data integrations. My manager is more knowledgeable about the data and underlying system, but I have more technical expertise at the scale we are working, given the new systems/architecture.

The problem is that we're a small team with work from home policy, so catch up meetings get cancelled and put off. The specifications are usually email threads, which are fine for quick fixes or small tasks, whereas I like a central written document/project plan that outlines the requirements and approach, including potential problems or limitations from the outset. Those questions may become something in an email thread, but unless there is a document/project plan then things get lost.

Generally I like standardized approaches at least to get people on the same page and understand accountability. I accept we can't know everything up front and it's easy to go off on a tangent; that's the real world. But without a base to bring everything together and focus priorities, that leads to failure or problems further down the line.

https://redd.it/1vb0wfs
@r_devops

Share your tips and tricks

0 3 * * * /usr/local/bin/send_alerts.sh

https://redd.it/1vb530a
@r_devops

How do you stop thinking about work after your workday ends?

I’ve realized that even after I finish work, my brain keeps thinking about it.
I replay conversations, think about problems I didn’t solve, plan tomorrow’s tasks, or imagine different scenarios. Sometimes it feels like I’m still working hours after I’ve logged off.
I’m curious: how do you mentally switch off?
Do you have any routines, hobbies, or habits that help you leave work at work? Or did it simply get easier with experience?
I’d love to hear what actually works for you.

https://redd.it/1vbb735
@r_devops

I'm lost after 3 years in DevOps. What would you do?

Hi everyone,

I'm looking for advice from people who have been in this field longer than I have.

I'm an Arts graduate who got into DevOps about 3.3 years ago. I've switched 3 companies and recently joined my 4th company, a large GCC. Along the way I've worked with AWS, Kubernetes, Terraform, CI/CD, automation, and earned AWS & CKA certifications.

The problem is that I'm no longer sure what I should be aiming for.

My current role has an exhausting work culture, the learning isn't what I expected, and it has made me rethink my long-term direction. I don't want to keep switching jobs without a clear goal.

If you were in my position today, what would you optimize for over the next 3–5 years?

1. Become a top-tier Platform Engineer/SRE?

2. Move towards AI/LLM engineering?

3. Solutions Architect

4. Security?

5. Target remote international jobs?

6. Prepare to move abroad?

I'd really appreciate hearing from engineers with 8–15+ years of experience. If you were starting over with my experience today, what roadmap would you follow and why?

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

Another Friday, another Bitbucket outage.

Who doesn't love Friday releases? Atlassian status page is green as usual.

https://redd.it/1vbpxj4
@r_devops

Derivations to Deployments: Practical Nix in Production

Great talk about how Antithesis uses Nix in production by John Murray. Thought some of you would enjoy. https://youtu.be/WaPOtisNu1k

I've been interested in Nix for a while but have not yet taken the plunge. Do any of you use it work? What has your experience been with it?

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

How do i get my confidence back?!

Hey! Quick background on me — graduated in 2020 from a tier 2 college, landed a third-party role at a Tier1 investment bank as an SRE, and ended up staying 5 years (got converted to full-time after the first 2). Got laid off in May 2025, honestly wasn’t mad about it since I wanted out anyway.
Most of the work i did was on there in house tools and i felt there was no learning curve there

That same month I interviewed for a “DevOps Engineer - Migration Specialist” role and got it. Felt good, got comfortable again. But once I actually joined, I realized it’s basically an L2 support role. Pay was decent though, so I told myself I’d stick around a year, upskill on the side, then jump ship.

Except… I didn’t. The role’s been so low on mental engagement that I just coasted. Now it’s actually time to switch, and I’m stuck in this weird spot — feels like I need to relearn everything from scratch, but every time I try, it’s like “wait, I already know this?” Hard to tell if I’m actually behind or just psyching myself out.

So — what’s a realistic (and ideally not soul-crushing) way to get back on track?
Please give me suggestions for fast-track courses and small projects to build production skills again.

Ps:- Used Ai to fix my crude version of this post

https://redd.it/1vbufg6
@r_devops

What are the top automated root cause analysis tools today?

We had a major production incident a few weeks ago that really exposed how manual our root cause analysis process still is. Incident was pretty standard on paper: error rate spike across a couple of microservices, latency blowup on one critical api, customers hitting timeouts. We have the usual observability stack, distributed tracing, logs, metrics, dashboards, plus tickets and slack channels but getting to "what broke first, and why" was mostly humans correlating tabs manually. The incident response workflow looked like this: jump into the oncall war room, pull up dashboards, zoom in on the time window and pivot between error logs, traces, deploy history, feature flag changes and infra events. someone manually builds an incident timeline, a deploy goes out, error rate spikes shortly after, latency climbs, autoscaling kicks in, db connections start flapping. then another person tries to connect that narrative back to the specific service, function, or config change that caused it, which is the actual root cause analysis part nobody's automated yet. We do have some ai-powered anomaly detection and basic rca signals turned on but in practice they mostly narrow the blast radius instead of giving a confident, explainable root cause. it still feels like humans doing the hard work, with the tooling just providing hints rather than a real diagnosis. Looking for automated root cause analysis tools that can take telemetry, logs, metrics, traces, infra events, together with deploy and feature flag changes and output a credible "this change in this service is most likely the cause, here's why." also interested in platforms where the rca output is good enough to drop straight into a postmortem instead of needing another hour of digging and anything beyond the usual big observability platforms, especially newer ai-native rca tools that sit on top of existing observability instead of trying to replace it, that's noticeably reduced incident triage time or mttr without just adding another noisy dashboard. if you're running any of these in production, what do you still consider "top" for automated root cause analysis today?

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