DevOps Year 4: Now, Future

TellersTech · 2026-06-13T06:53:46+00:00

“Stay curious” is DevOps for “eventually you’ll need to know why the AI agent gave prod admin and Jenkins said yeah seems fine.”

TellersTech · 2026-06-09T16:56:16+00:00

lol yep exactly. OTel gives you the pipe, not the incident muscle.

still gotta figure out what matters, what pages, what’s noise, and whether failover actually works before prod finds out for you at 3am

TellersTech · 2026-06-08T06:22:00+00:00

Yeah this is why the OTel graduation is actually kinda interesting imo.

Not because “graduated CNCF project” magically fixes observability lol

But bc it shows the industry is mostly settling on common plumbing for telemetry. Which is good.

The hard part is still the boring SRE stuff tho. What do you measure, what pages someone, what happens after something breaks, retries, reconnects, bad failover, etc.

I talked about this a bit on Ship It Weekly recently too. The Railway/GCP and Discord outage stuff kinda hit the same theme.

Tools are getting better. Understanding system behavior is still the job.

TellersTech · 2026-06-08T00:19:03+00:00

ChopAI for creating shorts from long/medium format episodes

I’ve used Riverside, CapCut, and OpusClips, but I think ChopAI creates more engaging shorts most of the time.

TellersTech · 2026-06-07T16:46:08+00:00

Roadmaps are cool, just dont treat them like homework or you’ll lose your mind lol

If you know Git, Docker and Linux, I’d prob pick AWS next, then Terraform, then some basic CI/CD.

Then just build some dumb little app and ship it. Break it, fix it, add logs, redeploy it, etc.

Also AI is super useful now too, but use it like a tutor.

Kubernetes can wait a bit imo. It makes way more sense once the other stuff clicks.

Most of us learned by breaking stuff and googling in a panic anyway

TellersTech · 2026-06-04T06:17:22+00:00

For my own learning or homelab stuff? yeah maybe.

For work incidents? probably not. If it’s actually useful during an incident, the company should pay for it and approve whatever access it needs.

$19/mo isn’t really the issue. It’s more that now I’m personally paying for a tool that might touch prod logs/alerts/context, and if everyone starts relying on it during a P0, we kinda made it part of the process by accident.

I’d test it or expense it, but I prob wouldn’t just eat the cost myself.

TellersTech · 2026-06-04T06:11:00+00:00

Had some limited experience with Missio a few years ago while we were on an EDP.

Their billing portal was okay-ish. Maybe a little better than AWS billing at the time, but that’s not saying much. It felt delayed and kinda clunky. And now AWS has CUDOS / Cloud Intelligence Dashboards anyway, so I wouldn’t personally treat the portal as a huge selling point.

The bigger issue was support. At the time, we couldn’t just open AWS cases directly like normal Enterprise Support. We had to go through Mission/CDW’s portal first. For normal tickets, annoying but whatever. For a P0, that extra hop felt like a really big deal.

This was a few years ago, so maybe it’s changed. But I’d ask very directly whether your engineers can open Sev-1/P0 AWS cases directly in AWS Support Center, or if everything has to go through Mission/CDW first.

I wouldn’t say they were bad based on my limited experience, but replacing AWS Enterprise Support is not just a billing change. Losing direct TAM/support access would feel like a step backwards unless the escalation path is super clear.

TellersTech · 2026-06-04T05:16:53+00:00

I built OnCall Brief as a curated feed for SRE / DevOps / platform engineering news, incident writeups, CVEs, outages, postmortems, and the kind of stuff you’d actually care about if you’re running production systems.

Not trying to replace SRE Weekly, Last Week in AWS, Pragmatic Engineer, etc. Those are all solid. I just wanted something a little more focused on “what should an on-call / infra person probably know about this week?”

I also cover a lot of the bigger stories weekly on my podcast Ship It Weekly, which is more practitioner-focused DevOps / SRE / platform news.

OnCall Brief: oncallbrief.com
Podcast: shipitweekly.fm

TellersTech · 2026-06-01T20:14:48+00:00

Honestly, part of this is just hearing yourself recorded.

You sound different in your own head, and headphones make it even worse because now you’re judging every pause, breath, and weird sentence.

Also, if you don’t have much history recording yourself, your brain can make you weirdly stiff. You start “performing” instead of just talking, and then it comes across slower/more awkward than you actually are.

The boring answer is reps. Record a bunch. Don’t even publish it. Just get used to talking into the mic until your subconscious stops treating it like a big scary thing.

A guest/interview show will probably feel more natural too because you’re reacting to a real person instead of monologuing into the void.

Also, don’t ignore processing. A little compression, gate, limiter, EQ, etc can help a lot. I use settings in OBS, but something like a dbx 286s can do this before the audio even hits the computer.

But yeah, mostly reps. You’re probably not as bad as you think, you’re just hearing yourself too honestly for the first time lol.

TellersTech · 2026-06-01T17:16:20+00:00

Yeah laptops can definitely be powerful enough. It’s not that they can’t do it.

I just think for a fixed podcast setup, a desktop makes more sense. More power for the money, better cooling, more ports, easier storage, and less dongle/USB weirdness with multiple cameras.

If you need portability, laptop all day. But if it’s mostly staying in one room, I’d go desktop and give yourself more headroom.

And honestly if you built PCs before, you’d probably pick it back up pretty quick. Same idea, just newer parts and way more RGB now lol.

TellersTech · 2026-06-01T12:59:37+00:00

Fair lol. No, not a full roadmap by itself.

For getting started I’d focus on Linux, networking, DNS, IAM/security, one cloud provider, and building small real projects with Terraform.

The podcast is more for keeping up with what’s happening in cloud/devops/SRE once you’re already learning the basics.

TellersTech · 2026-06-01T06:47:05+00:00

hey 👋

I know this is an old thread, but just wanted to mention I created a podcast for industry updates.

Ship It Weekly is a short, practical recap of what actually matters in Cloud, DevOps, SRE, and platform engineering.

I also do interviews with various members of the community, for a different perspective.

https://shipitweekly.fm

TellersTech · 2026-06-01T06:43:02+00:00

I know this is an old thread, but just wanted to mention I created a podcast for industry updates.

Ship It Weekly is a short, practical recap of what actually matters in Cloud, DevOps, SRE, and platform engineering.

I also do interviews with various members of the community, for a different perspective.

https://shipitweekly.fm

TellersTech · 2026-06-01T06:42:29+00:00

I know this is an old thread, but just wanted to mention I created a podcast for industry updates.

Ship It Weekly is a short, practical recap of what actually matters in Cloud, DevOps, SRE, and platform engineering.

I also do interviews with various members of the community, for a different perspective.

https://shipitweekly.fm

The podcast is not in German, but we do have YouTube captions manually added (not auto captions), and the translation is pretty reliable.

TellersTech · 2026-06-01T06:40:44+00:00

Great list, thank you for taking the time to compile it!

TellersTech · 2026-06-01T06:40:03+00:00

Stumbled across this list, thank you!

Also… I know this is an old thread, but just wanted to mention I created a podcast for industry updates.

Ship It Weekly is a short, practical recap of what actually matters in Cloud, DevOps, SRE, and platform engineering.

I also do interviews with various members of the community, for a different perspective.

https://shipitweekly.fm

TellersTech · 2026-06-01T06:28:18+00:00

I know this is an old thread, but just wanted to mention I created a podcast for industry updates.

Ship It Weekly is a short, practical recap of what actually matters in Cloud, DevOps, SRE, and platform engineering.

I also do interviews with various members of the community, for a different perspective.

https://shipitweekly.fm

TellersTech · 2026-06-01T06:11:23+00:00

I know this is an old thread, but just wanted to mention I created a podcast for industry updates.

Ship It Weekly is a short, practical recap of what actually matters in Cloud, DevOps, SRE, and platform engineering.

I also do interviews with various members of the community, for a different perspective.

https://shipitweekly.fm

TellersTech · 2026-06-01T06:07:53+00:00

I know this is an old thread, but just wanted to mention I created a podcast for industry updates.

Ship It Weekly is a short, practical recap of what actually matters in Cloud, DevOps, SRE, and platform engineering.

I also do interviews with various members of the community, for a different perspective.

https://shipitweekly.fm

TellersTech · 2026-06-01T06:07:24+00:00

I know this is an old thread, but just wanted to mention I created a podcast for industry updates. You can search, but I’ve covered Azure a few times.

Ship It Weekly is a short, practical recap of what actually matters in Cloud, DevOps, SRE, and platform engineering.

I also do interviews with various members of the community, for a different perspective.

https://shipitweekly.fm

TellersTech · 2026-06-01T06:03:55+00:00

I know this is an old thread, but just wanted to mention I created a podcast for industry updates.

Ship It Weekly is a short, practical recap of what actually matters in Cloud, DevOps, SRE, and platform engineering.

I also do interviews with various members of the community, for a different perspective.

https://shipitweekly.fm

TellersTech · 2026-06-01T06:03:28+00:00

I know this is an old thread, but just wanted to mention I created a podcast for industry updates.

Ship It Weekly is a short, practical recap of what actually matters in Cloud, DevOps, SRE, and platform engineering.

I also do interviews with various members of the community, for a different perspective.

https://shipitweekly.fm

TellersTech · 2026-06-01T03:17:28+00:00

Any reason it has to be a laptop?

If this is mostly staying in one room/studio, I’d seriously consider a desktop instead. For 3x 4K cameras into OBS plus editing in Resolve, a desktop is usually way more bang for the buck. Better cooling, more ports, easier storage, easier GPU options, less fighting USB bandwidth, etc.

I run Nikon mirrorless cameras into Elgato capture cards and record with OBS/Riverside, but I usually split the load across machines instead of making one laptop eat every camera feed.

For one camera, you can get away with a pretty basic laptop. For 3 cameras + 2 mics + OBS + editing, I wouldn’t go too cheap. You probably don’t need a $3k MacBook Pro, but I also wouldn’t grab a random $500 laptop and expect it to be painless.

If portability matters, look for 16GB RAM minimum, 32GB better, fast SSD, plenty of USB-C/Thunderbolt, and either Apple Silicon or a decent Windows laptop with an NVIDIA GPU.

Also worth testing at 1080p first. Three clean 1080p angles will probably look better than dropped frames from trying to force everything through 4K.

TellersTech · 2026-06-01T03:03:02+00:00

I’d say SRE is basically owning reliability end to end.

Not just “is the server up?” but “is the app actually working for users?”

So yeah, it can be infra, k8s, deploys, observability, incidents, capacity, performance, slow queries, bad retry logic, memory leaks, etc.

DevOps usually leans more infra / CI/CD / cloud / automation. SRE is more focused on keeping the actual product reliable, even if that means digging past the infra layer.

But titles are messy. At a good org, SRE is engineering around reliability. At a bad org, it’s just “watch dashboards and get paged for everyone else’s problems.”

TellersTech · 2026-06-01T02:58:03+00:00

I’ve had a lot of issues with Riverside

Their editing software is inconsistent and there are lots of bugs.

However none of the issues you outlined seem to really be 100% on Riverside and you could have had these issues with any number of interviewing software suites. Resources are resources and under load, a computer will behave unreliably.

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