Digest #195: Tech in 2026, SRE Agent with Claude and Kubernetes, CI/CD for Monorepo and Free DevOps Certificates
2026 tech predictions & autonomous monitoring with Claude and Kubernetes, CI/CD for monorepos, AWS cost allocation, Go memory internals, and centralized alerting at scale.
Welcome to this week’s edition of the DevOps Bulletin and happy New Year 2026 🎉
This week: AWS’s CTO share his predictions for 2026 and beyond, why developers are gaming GitHub profiles (and why stars don’t mean what they used to), and an honest reflection on year eight as a founder CTO. We also look at the production bug that made one engineer finally care about undefined behavior, and how Decathlon switched from Spark to Polars to speed up data pipelines while cutting infrastructure costs.
On the hands-on side: building an autonomous monitoring agent with Claude and Kubernetes, mapping real-world initial access vectors into AWS environments, designing CI/CD pipelines for monorepos, organizing cloud spend with AWS cost allocation tags, monitoring a Docker homelab, understanding memory allocation in Go, why clock synchronization is harder than it looks, and building centralized alerting across an AWS organization with CloudWatch, EventBridge, Lambda, and CDK.
This week’s video is a blunt reflection on why 2025 was rough for software engineers: a brutal job market, rising costs, endless AI tools that don’t actually improve software quality, supply-chain breaches becoming routine, and a growing gap between “AI hype” and real developer productivity.
Open-source picks this week include ZITADEL, an open-source identity and access management platform; SerenityOS, a from-scratch Unix-like operating system with its own kernel and desktop; SeaQuery, a type-safe Rust library for building SQL queries; a community-maintained list of free cloud and DevOps certifications; and Ensue, a persistent memory system for AI tools.
FinOps tip of the week: many AWS services ship with safe but expensive defaults. Fix log retention, storage tiers, and cross-AZ traffic once, then bake the right defaults directly into your Terraform templates.
All this and more in this week’s DevOps Bulletin, don’t miss out!
Newsworthy stories
The production bug that made me care about undefined behavior
Decathlon switches to Polars to optimize data pipelines and infrastructure costs
Tutorials of the week
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Videos of the week
📘 FinOps tip of the week
Many AWS services ship with safe but expensive defaults. Log retention, storage tiers, and cross AZ traffic are often set to safe but expensive values. Fix them once, then bake the right defaults into your Terraform templates.
If you want more hands-on tips like this, check out my latest book, “Practical FinOps”.
Projects of the week
ZITADEL is an open source identity and access management platform for authentication, authorization, and user management.
A from scratch Unix like operating system with its own kernel, desktop environment, browser, and developer tools, inspired by classic 90s interfaces.
SeaQuery is a Rust library for building SQL queries programmatically using a type safe and ergonomic API, with support for MySQL, Postgres, and SQLite.
A community maintained list of free online courses and certification programs across cloud, DevOps, security, data, and software engineering.
Ensue is a persistent memory system for AI tools that stores your knowledge, preferences, and decisions across conversations.
Meme of the week
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