From Operator to Agent Manager: The Real Shift in Network Engineering
I’ve been saying for ten years that network automation was three years away from being the only way to do things. Every year I moved the goalposts, because the data never caught up to the rhetoric. After a decade of scripts, YAML, Ansible, Terraform, and every NetDevOps framework we could throw at the problem, roughly […]
Is Java Enterprise Ready for AI? Absolutely
AI is transforming software engineering. For enterprise Java developers, the key question is whether Java and Jakarta EE are prepared to integrate AI into enterprise applications. The answer is yes. Java and Jakarta EE already support integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) and AI capabilities through existing APIs, libraries, and frameworks. Developers can continue using […]
The Anatomy of a $900,000 Validation Bill
A 50-developer team shipping at an agentic pace will spend roughly $900,000 this year on AI and developer tooling costs. Most of the engineering leaders I’ve talked to saw the compute costs coming. What they didn’t anticipate was where the rest of the bill was hiding. The culprit is a timing problem. Frontier models price […]
IaC Isn’t Dying. AI Makes it More Important
AI-generated infrastructure code is arriving faster than most organizations can absorb it. The organizations that invested in platform quality first are the ones pulling ahead. Every few years, someone declares that Infrastructure as Code is dead. The arguments tend to “sidecar” the hype cycle. First, complexity, then containers, then Kubernetes, then serverless. Now it’s AI’s […]
AI Is Here to Stay. The Real Challenge Is Operating It Securely
AI-generated code is already in production. Whether we are comfortable with that or not is beside the point. In the OpenStack project, which I have helped steward for more than 15 years, we are seeing developers submit patches built with AI assistance, and sometimes patches composed almost entirely by AI tools. Some of those contributions […]
The Validation Gap Is Costing You More Than You Think
Our latest State of Software Delivery report analyzed more than 28 million CI workflows and found a pattern that should give engineering leaders pause. Average throughput grew 59% year over year. Main branch activity for the median team declined 7%. Teams are generating more code than ever before. Less of it is reaching production. The […]
AI Is Changing How We Write Infrastructure, But It’s Not Solving How We Control It
Over the past year, AI has fundamentally changed how software is written. Infrastructure code is no exception. Tasks that once required deep familiarity with tools, syntax, and workflows can now be handled through natural language. Engineers are no longer starting from a blank file. In many cases, reviewing and modifying code generated for them has […]
Iceberg Won the Format War — Now Comes the Hard Part
Apache Iceberg has effectively won the open table format conversation. AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft, Snowflake, Databricks — every major platform has thrown its weight behind it. If you work in data engineering or platform operations, the question is no longer whether Iceberg is the right foundation. It’s what it actually takes to run it day […]
Why the Next Wave of Infrastructure Automation Requires a Different Kind of Intelligence
Every decade or so, something fundamental shifts in how we think about infrastructure. Not an upgrade, a rethinking. Virtualization changed what infrastructure was. The cloud changed where it lived. Infrastructure as Code changed how it was defined. Each of those shifts felt incremental from the inside and transformative in hindsight. We’re at one of those […]
Bridging the Dev–Security Gap With Smarter Authorization
Software teams have always lived with a built-in tension – developers push to ship fast, while security teams pump the brakes to assess risk. Now, with AI flooding the enterprise, that friction is spiking. One recent survey found a staggering 322% jump in privilege-escalation risks tied to AI-generated code. The root problem isn’t new – […]
The Future of Infrastructure Automation in the Age of Autonomous Agents
For more than a decade, the evolution of infrastructure automation has followed a clear trajectory. Organizations have invested in workflows, pipelines, controllers, and compliance engines because the market demanded stronger guarantees around reliability and scale. Outages turned into measurable losses. Small misconfigurations cascaded into systemic failures. Even highly skilled teams struggled to keep pace with […]
ClickOps, IaC and the Excluded Avocado Middle
Let’s start with a confession: I think Infrastructure-as-Code solves a lot of problems. Terraform, OpenTofu, Pulumi, all of it. IaC changed how we work. It gave us version control, audit trails, repeatability, and a level of discipline that the old “log in and click around” era couldn’t touch. But somewhere along the way, we turned […]
Learning From the Past: What Automation Mistakes Can Teach Us About AI
Across industries, organizations are rushing to embed AI into their operations. In fact, 84% of organizations are looking to add more AI capabilities within the next three years. From customer service bots to AI copilots, the future is arriving faster than many expected. But in the rush for quick wins, many executives are overlooking a […]
Securing the AI Era: How Development, Security, and Compliance Must Evolve
The Code Boom and Its Paradox We are witnessing an unprecedented shift in how software is built. With the rise of AI copilots, automated agents, and low-code platforms, code is being produced faster than at any point in history. What once took weeks can now be generated in minutes. This is a remarkable advance, but […]
Infrastructure as Code, Security Blind Spots, and the Messy Reality of DevOps
I’ve spent most of my career in infrastructure and reliability engineering, from years as an SRE at Google to leading teams at Facebook and now building Spacelift. Along the way, I’ve watched entire paradigms rise and fall, seen technologies mature, and learned some hard lessons about where DevOps and security meet—and where they clash. The […]
The EU’s Cyber Resilience Act: Redefining Secure Software Development
The European Union’s Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) marks a turning point for anyone building, selling, or maintaining digital products. Whether it’s enterprise software, consumer apps, IoT devices, or embedded systems, the CRA sets rigorous cybersecurity requirements that apply throughout a product’s entire lifecycle, from design and development to deployment, maintenance, and secure decommissioning. At its […]
From Automation to Orchestration: The Key to Digital Success
Digital transformation continues to be a key focus for many organizations, and this usually means the automation of processes and data. At its core, automation is meant to simplify and streamline business operations. However, if not implemented correctly, it can introduce complexity, risk and fragmentation. The proliferation of automation tools, combined with the rapid growth […]
Managing Day 2 Concerns for Agentic AI Architecture
We’re now in the fifth wave of computing. If that sounds dramatic, that’s because it is—and probably also because someone in marketing really wants to make “agentic AI” stick. For those keeping track at home, the first four waves were mainframes (your granddad’s computer), web (when we were all hopeful), cloud (when we were still […]
Hybrid Infrastructure Is a Mess—But It Doesn’t Have to Be
If you’re a CIO who is managing hybrid infrastructure, you’re like the peace-keeper in a dysfunctional family. On one side, you’ve got the old-school on-prem team—practical, cost-conscious, maybe a little stubborn. On the other hand, the cloud team is fast-moving, quickly adopting the latest tools, and sometimes a little dismissive of “legacy” infrastructure. And just […]
The DevOps Bottleneck: Why IaC Orchestration is the Missing Piece
If you work in DevOps, you’ve heard it a thousand times: “Do more with less.” More automation, more security, more reliability—but with the same (or fewer) people. Meanwhile, your development teams keep growing, pushing out new features at breakneck speed. Yet somehow, the infrastructure team is supposed to scale magically to keep up. Let’s be […]