ZopDev writing tagged platform-engineering. Engineering and FinOps notes, post-mortems, and benchmarks.
Most engineering teams pick one of two bad options for preview environments. They share a staging environment and fight over it. Or they give every engineer a dedicated environment that runs 24 hours…
Self-Service Terraform: 8 Modules That Killed 60% of Our Platform Tickets Platform teams do not fail because they hire the wrong people. They fail because the right people spend most of their time…
A new engineer joins on Monday. By Friday they need their first production-grade EKS cluster running so they can deploy the service they were hired to build. They open the company's Terraform module.…
A platform team picks Cloud Custodian in week one. By week six they realize Custodian fires after the resource is created, the wrong shape for blocking misconfigured Terraform plans. They add OPA. By…
The cost of onboarding a new engineer at a mid-sized cloud-infrastructure org never shows up on a finance dashboard. There's no line item for "hours spent searching for the right runbook" or "Slack…
A platform team starts a security review for a cost-optimization vendor. The vendor's onboarding doc asks for a CloudFormation template that creates a role with "to ensure all features work." The…
An alert fires at 2:47 AM. A pod in the namespace is in CrashLoopBackOff. The on-call engineer reads the alert, opens Slack to find the team that owns , opens the wiki to find what policies apply to…
Istio sidecars cost 0.5 vCPU per pod at idle. At 100 pods, you're paying for 50 idle vCPUs. eBPF moves observability into the kernel — one hook point per node, not per pod. Here's the architecture, the tools, and when you still need Envoy.
Every service provisioned from a Backstage template starts with zero budget alerts, zero mandatory tags, and a dev environment that runs 24/7. The platform team didn't choose this — they just never added cost defaults to the template. Here's how to fix that.
Backstage has a $0 license fee and requires 2-3 senior engineers full-time. This piece works through the build vs buy decision with real TCO numbers and a decision framework.
Teams adopt Backstage for developer experience but few measure what it costs to run. This breakdown covers hosting, staffing, plugin rot, catalog hygiene overhead, and when the ROI actually makes sense.
Most cloud governance platforms have a blind spot. They enforce access controls on your infrastructure but leave their own control plane wide open. Here's how to fix it with graduated RBAC.
Most teams running shared Kubernetes clusters believe they have isolation. They have namespaces. It feels like separation. It is not. Here's how to configure actual multi-tenancy.
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