Digest #187: AWS Alternatives, AI-Driven DevOps, Airbnb Runs Kubernetes at Scale and Terraform Drift Detection
How Figma detects sensitive data exposure, Airbnb runs distributed databases on Kubernetes, and Nubank processes a trillion log entries a day. Plus, hands-on guides and new open-source tools.
Welcome to this week’s edition of the DevOps Bulletin!
A startup ditched AWS and cut costs by 10×, Figma shared how it detects sensitive data leaks at scale, and Airbnb revealed how it runs distributed databases on Kubernetes across multiple clusters. Meanwhile, Salesforce detailed a system processing 400M events a day, and Nubank built a logging platform for 1 trillion entries.
Engineers debated Python vs Node.js after one team migrated completely, while another learned what a day without AI feels like. Buildkite rolled out a faster Kubernetes agent, and Facets launched Intelligence, an AI system that turns days of DevOps work into minutes of orchestration.
Hands-on this week: SQL tuning, Terraform drift detection, PostgreSQL table migration, Node.js memory management, and preventing Kubernetes from fetching images online.
Tools of the week: qqqa (LLM shell assistant), Zarf (air-gap package manager), Bytebase (DB migrations), Nydus (image acceleration), SlackFS (Slack as a filesystem), MCP Scanner (AI tool audit), and Termix (web-based SSH manager).
All this and more in this week’s DevOps Bulletin, don’t miss out!
Newsworthy stories
Send this article to your friend who still thinks the cloud is a good idea
How Airbnb runs distributed databases on Kubernetes at scale
How Nubank built an in-house logging platform for 1 trillion log entries
Not a copilot. Not another chatbot. Facets Intelligence understands intent, architects systems, and deploys infrastructure end-to-end. Watch how Facets turns 5 days of DevOps work into 60 minutes of orchestration magic, from requirements to a fully working cloud environment.
Join the conversation on LinkedIn. See what the DevOps community is saying about this launch.
Tutorials of the week
SQL performance improvements: finding the right queries to fix
Preventing Kubernetes from pulling the pause image from the internet
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Videos of the week
📘 FinOps Tip of the Week
Every time two AWS resources in different Availability Zones talk to each other, you’re charged $0.01/GB in each direction, even inside the same region. If your EC2 instance in us-east-1a queries a database in us-east-1b, that traffic isn’t free.
✅ Keep chatty resources in the same AZ
✅ Review VPC Flow Logs for cross-AZ patterns
✅ Disable cross-AZ routing in load balancers when not needed
If you want more hands-on tips like this, check out my latest book, “Practical FinOps”.
Projects of the week
qqqa is a two-in-one, stateless CLI tool that brings LLM assistance to your shell.
Zarf is an open-source airgap package manager for Kubernetes, simplifying the deployment of cloud-native applications in offline or secure environments.
Bytebase is a platform that helps teams manage schema changes, automate migrations, enforce SQL standards, and ensure data security across multiple databases.
Nydus is an open-source container image acceleration service that speeds up container startup and reduces storage and bandwidth costs.
SlackFS is a file system that allows you to mount Slack as a directory, exposing channels and messages as files to interact with Slack using standard shell tools.
A Python tool for scanning MCP (Model Context Protocol) servers and tools for potential security findings.
Termix is a web-based server management platform with SSH terminal, tunneling, and file editing capabilities.
Meme of the week
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