akhayam

Hey HN. We just released an Upgrade Context Server and an Upgrade Agent to upgrade OSS components running on a K8s Platform. Platform, DevOps, SRE teams can use this Server + Agent to easily and safely raise IaC PRs in their existing coding assistants (starting with Cursor).

The hard part of Platform upgrades isn’t the IaC syntax (TF, Jsonnet, CDK, Pulumi, etc.); it’s other “stuff”. This “stuff” has two main dimensions: 1. Gathering environment context: what’s actually running, which version is compatible for your stack, which breaking changes matter, and what IaC patterns you use, etc. 2. Making upgrade choices and getting team’s +1: Once you’ve got the environment context nailed down, you choose a version that will hold in production, applying diffs in a meaningful way (e.g. only surgical Helm values / RBAC changes, while CRDs can be overwritten), and surfacing “the why” and “the what” of these upgrade choices to PR reviewers so they can provide meaningful feedback.

Chkk Upgrade Context Server + Upgrade Agent focuses on those two problems. - Version recommendations are computed against your constraints and policies so targets are compatible and stable, not simply recent. - Diffs are scoped to what you actually run, with ordering and selectors that make changes deterministic and auditable. - Breaking changes, critical fixes, and upgrade considerations appear next to the change, so reviews move quickly and the blast radius for each change is well-understood upfront.

Initial support includes the Cursor IDE and Helm IaC across 260+ open-source projects, including Networking (Istio, Cilium, …), Databases (PostgreSQL, Redis, …), Data Jobs (Argo Workflows, Jenkins, …), Data Streams (Kafka, RabbitMQ, …), Observability (Datadog, Grafana, …), Security (cert-manager, Kyverno, …), Autoscaling (Karpenter, KEDA, …), and Developer Tooling (ArgoCD, Bitbucket, …).

Workflow walkthrough is in the launch blog linked with this post. Or you can just dive directly into setup and docs here: https://docs.chkk.io/ai/chkk-plus-cursor

It’s early and we would really appreciate feedback from the HN community, especially from teams juggling multi-cluster upgrades or inherited IaC. Looking forward to your feedback and happy to answer questions .

Guess what.... agents, like humans, also get confused with too much context, all at once. "Minimum relevant context injected at the right time" is how you assure quality artifacts and actions from your agentic workflows.

It's just sooo hard to reconstruct the "minimum relevant context" from running infrastructure state matched against a moving target (i.e. the next version you should be upgrading to).

"Operational Safety" is the neglected child of software operations. I saw how it was implemented effectively when working at AWS, but the broader software ecosystem appeared oblivious to this key concept. While the CrowdStrike outage caused havoc, its silver lining is that Operational Safety has now become a key consideration for software leaders, all the way to CIOs. It must stay this way as complex, mission-critical systems will continue to rely more and more on software and cascaded failures are just a fact of life in these systems.

Thanks! Indeed, sharing knowledge programmatically will save time and effort, _while_ improving safety of these systems.

Mostly by hiring contractors, which is basically not working well for a lot of enterprises.

Most are just focusing on incident response and reactively improving things. That's why a proactive discipline that prevents these issues from happening is dearly missed.

Even when postmortems are done, information continues to exist in team silos as there is no way to share these learning across teams and enterprises. Hence, everyone repeats each others' mistakes.

Platform teams is such a new concept and is catching on like wildfire inside enterprises. However, the technology, people and process challenges faced by these teams are really not understood very well. In this blog, we tried to crystallize the biggest obstacles that we see Platform teams facing.

Thanks for your encouraging words and we are glad that the challenges and solutions resonate.

What an excellent post. I love the "first felt PMF" criterion which is the right way to think about it because, like validated by interviews in this blog, most of the times you remain unsure that you have actually found PMF... and that's perfectly ok!

Beautifully said... one generation must do the less exciting things to pave the way for the next generation.

Being a dual Pakistan/USA citizen, I am deeply saddened by this meddling by US in Pakistan's internal politics. Imran, who I don't support BTW, was a hugely popular leader. Him being thrown out, then clandestine kidnappings of 10s of thousands of his party members, and finally the press and media not being allowed to even utter his name (yes, they are not allowed to say his name on air), is a civilian martial law that is as anti democratic as it gets.

I hope future US governments actually act as the flagships of democracy that we claim to be.

I would recommend doing Mechanical Turk work: https://www.mturk.com/.

It'll give you ideas for your next gig as well.

Wow... you left me wondering why signal processing teachers in college don't teach Kalman Filters with this simplicity. I know mathematical concepts are best taught mathematically, but that does led to information loss for those who don't have the background requisites.

I used to teach Discrete Cosine Transform and Wavelet Transform through images alone and would always find this teaching method of "intuition before rigor" work better than the other way around.

I have taken so much inspiration aviation industry when designing and operating software system. In addition to the inspirations mentioned in this blog, I find the idea of "antifragility" in aviation quite fascinating, where every near miss is studied, documented and checklisted across the entire aviation industry. This means that every near miss improves the resilience of the entire industry. We need to build similar means of learning from others' mistakes in complex software systems as well.

Neeva's sister company is also acquired by Snowflake.

Building on my original comment that spawned this post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36883436), I am amazed by how much devs hate open space and still most tech companies just decide to ignore that. For instance, at Amazon we had a yearly and a weekly feedback tool which had questions around things that impact morale and productivity. In the half a decade I was there, not once did I see a question around open office spaces.

Maybe they are waiting for all the devs to sign a petition to "Bring back cubicles. Even if it's not perfect, it's still better than open space."

alas... this is very true. I still think a well maintained CI system which actively prunes flaky tests can be a great productivity booster for the team. Doing so does require serious and continued investment though, which most teams aren't willing to make.

Teams not respecting their CI systems will end up shipping slow, low quality code.

That being said, the article referenced seemed to be talking about very basic and straightforward things. A far more nuanced and pragmatic perspective is required to get CI systems to work nicely with today’s CD (e.g. Argo, Flux, Spinnaker) and orchestration systems (e.g. k8s).

I have never been productive in open office spaces and then saw an HBS study showing empirical data on the things I felt all along: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rstb.2017.023...

I totally see the value of cultivating ideas in a private space without constant background noise, and then sharing these ideas with the right arguments for feedback when you see them as ripe.

Unfortunately, the narrative by big tech has popularized the notion that these open spaces with everyone speaking over each other has great productivity and collaboration benefits. It saves them a lot of cost to not build and maintain humane cubes, but other arguments of how great it is for "me" are just bogus.

Thanks for putting this together. Very useful and covers considerable ground from CNCF to languages.

I feel this trend taking root in academia is still a new-ish thing. The boundaries of academia and research, especially for computer science, really started blending 15-20 years ago as Big Tech took over Oil for the best paying job / grant.

The decay has been super fast though. Maybe some academics will find the courage to do a longitudinal study of this decay. Now that'll be an interesting paper to read.

And you have some of the smartest brains gaming it too... Such a sad use of good neurons :(

Breaking the rat race of academic publications is long overdue.

In some domains, the call to break this vicious cycle is already happening. E.g. ACM Sigcomm is one of the most prestigious and exclusive conference in Networking and Distributed Systems research. Some of the most profound researchers in that domain are driving a pledge to fundamentally rethink what the conference accepts and what gets presented: https://sigcomm.quest/proposal.html.

I hear the calls for blood here, but will offer a contrarian point of view. The pressures academic researchers have to face today are unparalleled, even in 95% of industry jobs. The pressure to publish continuously, pressure to win grants, pressure to be a great teacher, pressure to be a role model for students and younger faculty, pressure to balance all this with families that really need you too.

So we basically take the brightest minds and have them compete in a gladiatorial rate race. This system is so broken that something fundamental has to change here.

Not sure which ones, but here is the whole history of Marc's research publications: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=Marc...

Introvert and extrovert is the most widely misunderstood thing I have seen at work and in personal life. This article also doesn’t do justice to the nuance that introverts find interactions with other “draining” … but it’s not necessary that they suck at it.

I feel this way: having led teams of hundreds of people, I know I can have deep, meaningful and long conversations… but I don’t find them a source of joy.

I encourage reading this recent opinion post in Washington Post that delves into this nuance with a unique perspective: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/07/12/rebecca-m...

Lots of users seem to be impacted for a short time period: https://isdown.app/integrations/aws/amazon-cloudfront

AWS Status page doesn't show anything yet: https://health.aws.amazon.com/health/status

Few things in communications have had a bigger impact than the Alamouti code in the last 2 decades. Before this, it wasn't possible to send and receive from multiple antennas on the same band simultaneously. This paper opened the doors for transmit & receive side diversity, allowing unprecedented increases in bandwidth at which you could transmit wireless data.

Here is the original paper: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/730453

Tldr: you can bring your open source project to CNCF and if there are enough infra/platform developers vouching for it then you can become an incubated project. After that, there is a bunch of boxes (traction, integration, stability) that you need to check before CNCF endorses you as a graduated project.

You can read more about incubated and graduates CNCF projects here: https://www.cncf.io/projects/