CatOps Digest 2025-12-27
The last digest of this year...
Here we are. A digest that concludes this year. It should have been published yesterday, but we have a lot of things to do during the winter holiday season, including a Christmas party itself.
Here’s a random thought I had recently about the holidays: it’s interesting, how traditional holidays define public days off, which in turn define, when people have celebrations. I am not into the whole Jesus-thing, but the winter holiday season was always the holiday season of a year for me. When I moved to Germany, the official Christmas in Ukraine was still in January. However, here in Germany, people celebrate it in December, thus public holidays dictated the day on which we hold a party with our friends, gifts, etc.
Anyway, enough of the diversion, here’s the digest!
Charity
Let’s help a friend of mine to raise enough funds for a car for the Zaporizhzhia frontline. Monobank jar.
Another fundraiser from Serhii Sternenko. For the interceptor drones. Privat Bank envelope.
Digest
Shifting left at enterprise scale: how we manage Cloudflare with Infrastructure as Code - Cloudflare on how they use Terraform for their infrastructure. There’s nothing mind-blowing in this article, since they have a pretty standard setup, except for a custom backend, on which they do not elaborate anyway.
Pricing changes for GitHub Actions - an announcement from GitHub (Microsoft) that they later withdrew after a backlash. The whole deal was about GitHub Actions to charge $0.002 per minute for self-hosted runners.
A Safer Container Ecosystem with Docker: Free Docker Hardened Images - on the flip side, Docker makes their hardened images available to the public.
GraphQL: the enterprise honeymoon is over - a blog-post about GraphQL, more specifically its “plateau of productivity”. Tl;dr: unless you have a huge, complex setup, you probably do not need it. In any case, I am biased here. In my opinion, GraphQL is just SOAP for millennials.
Cold-Restart Resilience - a cautionary tale with a couple of examples about caveats of a system recovering from scratch. The list of things that can go wrong is not exhaustive, of course, but it’s an interesting read nevertheless.
Securing admin access to Monzo’s platform - a story of how Monzo guards the admin access to their systems. Their solution is based on AWS Nitro Enclaves with some automation around it.
This is it for this time, folks! See you in the new year!
I would appreciate hearing your thoughts about this newsletter going forward. I have started a Substack, when it was a “hot new thing”, similar to the way I started the CatOps Telegram channel back in the day. However, unlike with Telegram, I struggle a bit to understand the fit for this newsletter. If you have any idea, it would be great, if you could share them in the comments, or send me at: info@catops.dev
🎄🎄🎄 Happy holidays! 🎄🎄🎄
