Digest #168: OpenAI’s PostgreSQL at Scale, Databricks Buys Neon, S3 Migration Saves 90%, FinOps Tips, GitHub Actions Hardening & ECS with Minecraft

PostgreSQL tuning at OpenAI, $1B Neon deal, 300M-file S3 migration, EC2 boot time tricks, secrets management checklist, Kubernetes operator upgrades, and cool open-source tools.

Welcome to this week’s edition of the DevOps Bulletin!

This week, we’re covering how OpenAI is pushing PostgreSQL to its limits and how one team saved big by moving 300 million files to S3, cutting storage costs by 90%. Databricks is buying Neon, an open-source Postgres company, for $1B, and Datadog shares how they use LLMs to write better postmortems while keeping costs low.

In security, Have I Been Pwned 2.0 is here, and we take a look at key decisions that can make your systems safer with less effort.

Our video of the week features Jeremy Chaplin from Flexera, who talks about how engineers can play a bigger role in FinOps.

This week’s tutorials include:

• How to cut EC2 boot time from 4 seconds to 2.8 seconds

• An 18-step checklist for managing secrets safely

• How to run your own MCP server on AWS

• Use AWS Nova to add diagrams to your blog posts

• Automate pull secret sharing in Kubernetes with GitLab

• A safer way to upgrade Kubernetes operators

• Handle multiple AWS accounts without headaches

• Build a serverless API that works across regions

• Learn what to avoid when abstracting Kubernetes CRDs

• Host a Minecraft server to learn ECS

New projects worth checking out:

• Terraform MCP Server – connect Terraform with MCP

• SQLite-JS – write custom database functions in JavaScript

• ForgeMT – run GitHub Actions on demand across many tenants

• Cariddi – find secrets, tokens, and endpoints across websites

• Hotspot – a tool to look at Linux performance using a visual interface

• Act – test your GitHub Actions locally

• A set of MCP servers to help you work better with AWS

All this and more in this week’s DevOps Bulletin—don’t miss out!

Newsworthy Stories

• Scaling PostgreSQL to the next level at OpenAI

• How Datadog optimizes LLM use for cost, quality, and safety to facilitate writing postmortem

• Migrating 300 million files to AWS S3 to save 90% in storage costs

• Databricks to buy open-source database startup Neon for $1B

• Have I been Pwned 2.0

• High-leverage security decisions

Video of the week

Tutorials of the week

• Accelerating builds: Improving EC2 boot time from 4s to 2.8s

• The 18-point secrets management checklist

• Deploying an MCP server on AWS

• Using AWS Nova to augment the blog post with illustrations

• Kubernetes + GitLab: Automate pull secret distribution with ClusterSecret

• A side-by-side Kubernetes operator upgrade approach

• Azure verified module

• Saving your sanity when managing multiple AWS accounts

• Building a multi-region Serverless API with the AWS CDK, Lambda, and DynamoDB

  

• How to use Neon and ephemeral environments to simplify serverless development

• Kubernetes CRD abstraction risks in kro

• Learning ECS the fun way by hosting a Minecraft Server

Projects of the week

• Terraform MCP Server provides seamless integration with the Terraform ecosystem, enabling advanced automation and interaction capabilities for IaC development.

• SQLite-JS allows you to create custom SQLite functions in JavaScript. Extend your database with scalars, aggregates, window functions, and collations directly in JavaScript.

• Hotspot is a Linux perf GUI for performance analysis.

• ForgeMT is a secure, scalable GitHub Actions runner platform for ephemeral workloads. Designed for multi-tenant environments, it automates isolated runner provisioning on Kubernetes or EC2, with built-in OIDC, IAM, cost optimization, and deep observability.

• Cariddi takes a list of domains, crawls URLs, and scans for endpoints, secrets, api keys, file extensions, tokens, and more.

  

• A suite of specialized MCP servers that help you get the most out of AWS, wherever you use MCP.

• Act allows you to run your GitHub actions locally, rather than having to commit/push every time you want to test out the changes you are making to your .github/workflows/ files.

Meme of the week

If you have feedback to share or are interested in sponsoring this newsletter, feel free to reach out via LinkedIn, or simply reply to this email.