Ship It Weekly - DevOps, SRE, Platform and Cloud Engineering News

This is a guest conversation episode of Ship It Weekly, separate from the weekly news recaps.In this Ship It Conversations episode, I talk with Darko Fabijan about what starts breaking after the pull request when AI writes more of the code, what should sit between an AI agent and production, and why his answer is more automation.Darko is the CEO of SuperPlane and co-founder of Semaphore, the CI/CD platform. At SuperPlane, he's working on how to give AI agents write access to production in a controlled way.We start with what AI-generated code does to delivery. Pull requests are bigger and more frequent, reviewers can't keep up, and Darko points to a Faros AI report that shows defects and incidents going up. He describes AI as alien technology that dropped from the sky, landing in processes built for people who review code eight hours a day.His main hypothesis is a deterministic layer between AI agents and production, with scoped access that goes through approval. I bring up the rubber stamping problem with human approvals, and his reply is that humans hallucinate too. So he wants a risk score on every change. Renaming a bucket scores low. Deleting an S3 bucket or an RDS instance scores red.Then we get into the glued-together ops tooling most teams run on. Darko doesn't think anything is wrong with it. When I ask how SuperPlane differs from Argo Workflows or n8n, he says he wants agents and humans on the same plane, and he'd onboard an agent like a new engineer: give it an identity, let it look around, and show it what it can do. We also cover team-scoped agents, compliance at AI speed, and docs where every line traces back to what produced it.We finish on where to start. Darko says read-only first: he pretends to be super stupid, asks a lot of dumb questions, and says "onboard me." For the first write operations, he'd pick loops you can measure with a number, like latency, GitHub Actions speed or CVE count, tested on a copy of production or staging first.The big takeaway: AI didn't break software delivery. It showed how much of it still runs at human speed. Darko's answer is more automation, with a deterministic layer and a risk score between AI and production.Highlights• What breaks after the pull request when AI writes more of the code• A deterministic layer between AI agents and production• Rubber stamping, and a risk score for every change• Onboarding an AI agent like a new engineer• The dam and the river: compliance at AI speedLinksDarko Fabijan on LinkedIn: https://tsn.io/DySr5Darko Fabijan on X: https://tsn.io/xJGhNSuperPlane: https://tsn.io/o08yMSemaphore: https://tsn.io/jiHmdFaros AI's Acceleration Whiplash report: https://tsn.io/5ZCR3Argo Workflows: https://tsn.io/oyTYFn8n: https://tsn.io/nloFFMore episodes and show notes: https://tsn.io/NqkdPOn Call Brief: https://tsn.io/Gpz2dLMGT Awards: https://tsn.io/lAERA

This is a guest conversation episode of Ship It Weekly, separate from the weekly news recaps.In this Ship It Conversations episode, I talk with Jinger Meilani about Tabletop Retro, her way of turning an engineering retrospective into a tabletop role-playing game, and why a little silliness gets teams to give honest answers.Jinger is a Senior Software Engineer in DevOps at Mountain. She says Tabletop Retro brings together three things she loves: world building, psychological safety on teams, and engineering enablement.We start with why she reinvented the retro at all. She was bored of them, and even the themed ones got rote. At a previous company, the team rotated who ran the retro, and her turn landed around Halloween, so she built a story around the team. She calls the result retro plus plus plus. The usual formats and outcomes are all still there, inside a story.A lot of it comes down to silliness. Jinger compares it to hiding vegetables in a fruit smoothie: it disarms people, and she gets honest answers, sometimes while everyone thinks they're talking about something else. That's also why she won't run one during a fire. People have to feel comfortable before they'll speak their truth, so the flame-breathing dragon can wait.Then we get into how one is built. A Tabletop Retro is a series of chapters, and each chapter holds part of the story and at least one activity. Players fill out character sheets, and each in-game race maps to a technical archetype, like a Goliath for a high-level systems thinker or a gnome for a tinkering automation engineer. Afterward the team talks through what those picks say about their strengths and weaknesses. She presents it like a storybook, in Lucidchart or Canva over Zoom.Characters cut both ways. For some people, an orc is permission to say what they'd never put on a retro board, because it's not really how they feel. They're just an orc. Others find role-play intimidating, so she reads the room: improv for an outgoing teammate, a line on screen for someone else, or no speaking part at all. If you want to try one, start with the questions, not the world. Where is the team unaligned? When does communication break down? Then keep the setting small. Kids trick-or-treating is plenty.The big takeaway: a Tabletop Retro is still a retro, and Jinger holds it to a higher bar. If everyone has fun and tells you something honest, and then nothing changes, it failed. Someone still has to do the work.Highlights• Why she calls it retro plus plus plus• Hiding vegetables in a fruit smoothie• Why you don't run one during a fire• Chapters, character sheets and technical archetypes• "I'm just an orc," and why role-play makes some people nervous• Reading the room: improv, on-screen lines, or no lines at all• Start with the questions, then keep the world small• Fun with no follow-through is a failed retroLinksTabletop Retro, Jinger's framework: https://tsn.io/wXdtLJinger Meilani on LinkedIn: https://tsn.io/xn8JrJinger's IaCConf talk, Designing IaC Interfaces That Work for Humans, AI Agents, and Whatever Comes Next: https://tsn.io/5b4DMMore episodes and show notes: https://tsn.io/NqkdPOn Call Brief: https://tsn.io/Gpz2dLMGT Awards: https://tsn.io/lAERA

This week on Ship It Weekly, LiteLLM's release pipeline was hijacked again: stolen GitHub CLI tokens from three engineers changed the pipeline, kicked off the release and approved it, and a credential-stealing 1.107.0 went out to PyPI and Docker Hub. GitHub put a package firewall into public preview, with advisory and supply chain checks and a cooldown for new releases. PHP fixed PHP2Shell, two critical core runtime bugs (CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619) that someone tried to exploit four days before disclosure. And eMudhra, a certificate authority in India, found out the private keys for eight intermediate certificates could be worked out from its own public certificates.The thread: most of this came through things you depend on but don't run. A library's release pipeline, the registry you pull from, the runtime under your app, and the trust store in your images.In the lightning round: another GitLab CVSS 10 (CVE-2026-110264), Google's report on the europe-west2 London outage, AWS taking its European Sovereign Cloud off the global backbone on October 24, and a GitHub audit log change that can quietly break SIEM rules.The human closer, from Brent Chapman: page on what users actually do. Your users don't care how your machines feel. They care whether they can log in.On Monday, Jinger Meilani joins me to talk about running retros like a tabletop RPG.Highlights• LiteLLM 1.107.0: two stolen identities passed a two-person approval• GitHub package firewall: advisories, attestations and a cooldown• PHP2Shell: an exploit attempt four days before disclosure• Patching PHP is easy, finding all of it is hard• eMudhra: CA private keys worked out from public certificates• Page on what users feel, not how the machine feelsLinksLiteLLM 1.107.0 compromise (Wiz): https://tsn.io/yQtmuGitHub package firewall in public preview: https://tsn.io/QjofJPHP2Shell, CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619 (Help Net Security): https://tsn.io/GUyopEight eMudhra CA keys compromised (The Hacker News): https://tsn.io/K2jqMGitLab 19.5.1 patch release: https://tsn.io/0wsPXGoogle Cloud europe-west2 incident report: https://tsn.io/nVk2NAWS European Sovereign Cloud independent operation: https://tsn.io/gKnQlGitHub secret scanning updates: https://tsn.io/JDGmTStop paging on how your machines feel (Brent Chapman): https://tsn.io/MAItMSRE Weekly #539: https://tsn.io/XAsKzThis week's On Call Brief: https://tsn.io/nBAVgMore episodes and show notes: https://tsn.io/NqkdPOn Call Brief: https://tsn.io/Gpz2dLMGT Awards: https://tsn.io/lAERA

This is a guest conversation episode of Ship It Weekly, separate from the weekly news recaps.In this Ship It Conversations episode, I talk with Rob Koch about what accessible cloud native actually looks like, why sign language is still one of the hardest problems in AI, and why the fastest way to make your tooling accessible is to hire deaf engineers.Rob is a senior principal at Slalom, an AWS Hero, and co-chair of the CNCF Deaf and Hard of Hearing Working Group. Rob is Deaf, and his ASL interpreter, Amelia Fruehsamer, voices his answers. Special thanks to Amelia for interpreting the conversation.We start with an analogy Rob comes back to all episode: cloud native is the toolbox, and platform engineering is the workbench. Then we get into what's overhyped about AI, the guardrails it still needs, and what auditable AI observability looks like.A big part of the conversation is accessibility in practice. Rob explains how captions pushed for deaf attendees ended up helping neurodivergent folks too, and what conferences get wrong: accessibility planned at the very end instead of the start, and the real cost of interpreters versus captions.Then we get technical. Rob walks through using Kubernetes and Kubeflow to train models that recognize sign language, and why it's so hard: regional signs, lighting, skin tone and backgrounds, and a camera that can't tell which way a hand is facing. His joke: we don't have AGI until AI understands sign language.The big takeaway: start with people, not a checklist. Hire deaf and hard of hearing engineers, ask them how they want to work, and your tools get more accessible because they're in the room.Highlights• Cloud native as the toolbox, platform engineering as the workbench• What's overhyped about AI, and the guardrails it still needs• What accessible cloud native means in practice• Captions that help far more people than you planned for• What conferences get wrong about accessibility, and what it costs• Kubernetes and Kubeflow for sign language recognition• Gesture-based computing and why speech-to-text had a 30-year head start• Where to start: hire deaf engineersLinksRob Koch on LinkedIn: https://tsn.io/4qmFoRob Koch on GitHub: https://tsn.io/MbxrsAmelia Fruehsamer (Rob's ASL interpreter) on LinkedIn: https://tsn.io/UJB88CNCF Deaf and Hard of Hearing Working Group: https://tsn.io/tB1lSCNCF conference accessibility best practices: https://tsn.io/BZvpvCNCF Merge Forward: https://tsn.io/QPVNQKubeflow: https://tsn.io/4OVKfMore episodes and show notes: https://tsn.io/NqkdPOn Call Brief: https://tsn.io/Gpz2dLMGT Awards: https://tsn.io/lAERA

This week on Ship It Weekly, GitHub Actions workflow lockfiles land in public preview, pinning actions and their dependencies to exact commits. GitLab shipped a critical patch release for CVE-2026-97229, a CVSS 10 CI/CD regex flaw that could let an unauthenticated attacker run code on the server. Google published its final report on two Cloud Storage incidents in us-central1, including a recurrence caused by an incomplete rollback. And Linus Torvalds pushed an experimental kernel branch with page-cache patches built using Claude Code, as maintainers debate dropping the mandatory AI attribution tag.The thread this week: know what you're actually running, from the commit you reviewed to the state a rollback really left behind and code someone can still explain.In the lightning round: a record Patch Tuesday with more than 1,400 CVEs and an actively exploited Windows Shell bypass, GitHub AI Scan for pull requests and agentic autofix going GA, AWS Strands Box, an open-source agent sandbox that keeps real credentials out of the agent's environment, and a Microsoft 365 outage through Global Secure Access.The human closer comes from Paul LaPosta's “Your error budgets don't know AI exists.” AI has split shipping a change from understanding it, and SLOs don't measure comprehension. Your SLO can tell you the service is up. It cannot tell you whether anyone still understands it.Programming note: Ship It Weekly turns one next month, so expect more conversations over the next couple of months, usually two a week, starting Monday with Rob Koch.LinksGitHub Actions workflow lockfilesGitLab 19.4.2 / 19.3.5 / 19.2.8 patch releaseGoogle Cloud Storage incident reportLinus Torvalds and Claude Code (Phoronix)Linux drops the Assisted-by requirement (Phoronix)October 2026 Patch TuesdayGitHub AI Scan for pull requests GAAgentic autofix GAAWS Strands BoxMicrosoft 365 Global Secure Access outageYour error budgets don't know AI exists (LeadDev)This week's On Call Brief