The Workstation Blog
DevOps
Posts tagged DevOps.
Observability Is Not Optional: Make It a Business Standard
Why fragmented monitoring creates blind spots, duplicate spend, and slow incidents — and how to make centralised observability a non-negotiable company standard.
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WSL Vault for Compliance: One Tenant Never Opens Another’s Secrets
How WSL Vault keeps app, team, and environment tenants cryptographically isolated — so a stolen root-style token cannot empty the estate — and why dual-tenant control beats secrets sprawl.
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Workstation AI Shop: Promoting the AI Sales Storefront Through int → test → acc → prod
Workstation AI Shop sells GPU machines with a fully autonomous AI Sales Agent that configures the basket. See how Ring Promoter moves each build through int → test → acc → prod — with Orbit screenshots release engineers and stakeholders share.
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Ring Promoter vs Argo CD, Kargo and CI: Which Tool Answers Which Release Question
Argo CD syncs, CI builds, Ring Promoter promotes. A fact-checked look at the comparison, its honest limits, which tool fits, and how to record the choice as an ADR.
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Stop paying for idle CI: GitLab Runners on Kubernetes
Most teams pay for CI as if every night were still Monday morning. GitLab Runners on Kubernetes flip that: ephemeral job pods, scale up under load, scale down when quiet.
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How We Protected the Payments Secure FinTech App with WSLProxy Edge, an Open-Source API Gateway
How we put WSLProxy Edge, our open-source API gateway, in front of Payments Secure (payments-secure.fictionally.org): real-IP checks, scanner detection, login throttling and audit logs, rolled out safely in audit mode.
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Claude Code Routines: Scheduled Cloud Agents, Sub-Routines and Co-Routines
Claude Code Routines run saved agent tasks on Anthropic's cloud on a schedule, via API or on GitHub events. How they work, how to set one up, and how to chain them.
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Ring Promoter v1.0.2 — Rings, Orbit and Lanes Side by Side
Ring Promoter v1.0.2 ships Orbit and Lanes side by side — pause on Orbit for the fleet, flip to Lanes when you need the matrix.
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WSLVault: Why AI Agents Need Cryptographic Secrets Isolation
AI agents use secrets at machine speed across tools and tenants. WSLVault seals per tenant so a shared platform never leaks another team's plaintext.
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Jobshout SEO Analyst AI Agent — Analyse Any Website & Fix SEO Issues Automatically
We ran Jobshout SEO Analyst on workstation.co.uk — score 44/100 — with concrete fix prompts for missing H1, truncated title, and oversized meta description.
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WSLVault: Steal the Server. Not the Secrets.
WSLVault seals secrets before they touch disk — DEK to tenant KEK to root KEK — so a stolen host still leaves attackers with ciphertext they cannot open.
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How to Deploy Secure AI Agents in Healthcare
AI agents can book appointments, take payments and support clinical work. Here is how healthcare teams can give them the right access, and no more.
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Faster WSLProxy Deploys: Prebuilt Images, Build Cache — and Using AI So the Pipeline Work Actually Ships
Workstation WSL Proxy: compile OpenResty once into bwalia/wslproxy-openresty, warm Buildx/GHA layers, extract on bare metal, prefer DEPLOY_MODE=code — and why AI-assisted delivery made this cross-cutting work finishable.
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Claude Code, Claude Cowork & ChatGPT for Business Teams
Which teams should use Claude Code, Claude Cowork, or ChatGPT/OpenAI Agents — and the controls Workstation recommends before production.
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Enterprise Agentic Frameworks: LangChain, LangGraph & Airflow 3
Operational guide to LangGraph agents, LangSmith evals, and Apache Airflow 3 schedules — with Workstation promotion and edge patterns.
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AI GPU Workstations: NVIDIA DGX Spark/Station & Mac Studio M5
How Workstation maps NVIDIA DGX Spark, DGX Station, and Mac Studio M5 into AI Labs and SME packages — factual positioning, no invented prices.
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WSLProxy WAF Engine v2: Enterprise Enforcement You Can Explain
Workstation WSL Proxy WAF Engine v2: governed stages and signatures on the OpenResty hot path — explainable enforcement with support IDs.
Balinder WaliaRead WSL Proxy WAF: Explainable Web Application Firewall at the Edge
Workstation WSL Proxy WAF: governed stages and signatures on a live-config OpenResty edge — monitor or block, with explainable support IDs.
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Every Release Earns Production: Making Promotions Boring and Safe
Ring Promoter makes promotion a protocol: health-gated hops through int → test → acc → prod, auto-rollback, and full history — every release earns production.
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Ring Promoter — QA Gates Before Production
Ring Promoter QA gates: auto-promote early rings, keep a human gate before prod, and treat health plus version checks as first-class quality gates.
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Rust Async Blocking, Rayon & Modern Applications
Workstation on async Rust blocking, Rayon for CPU-bound work, and why Rust fits modern APIs, edge, agents, and CI/CD — inspired by Alice Ryhl’s Rayon guidance.
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Ring Promoter: Modern CI/CD You Cannot Miss for AI-Powered Deployments
Ring Promoter is the modern CI/CD control plane for AI-powered deployments: shared rings, health gates, version verification, auto-rollback, and multi-app promote.
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Workstation WSL Proxy: API Gateway, CDN & Agent Edge
Workstation WSL Proxy (WSLProxy) is a complete API gateway and CDN edge: live routing, WAF, cache, multi-POP DNS, MCP — with Agents Gateway and MCP Gateway in progress.
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KubePilot: CoPilot, Pilot & AutoPilot for Faster Kubernetes Incidents
KubePilot helps SRE, DevOps, and platform teams move from noisy cluster signals to a safe fix — CoPilot, Pilot, and AutoPilot. Open source at kubepilot.org.
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Agentic AI Security: MCP OAuth, VPN & HashiCorp Vault Leases
Secure enterprise AI agents with MCP OAuth 2.1, VPN-isolated tools, and HashiCorp Vault leases that auto-rotate and expire — plus Claude, OpenAI, and Cursor recommendations.
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What is Deep Learning? Workstation Guide for Builders & Business
Workstation rewrite of AWS What is Deep Learning: neural networks, generative AI, vision/speech/NLP/recommendations, and how teams ship DL in the cloud or on Kubernetes.
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Kimi K3 & Open Weights: Frontier Agents Without Locked-In APIs
Kimi K3 pushes open-weight models into frontier agent territory. What changed for developers, vLLM serving, MCP, and Workstation production advice.
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Claude Opus 5 on AWS: Workstation Guide for Builders & Business
Workstation take on Claude Opus 5 on Amazon Bedrock: agentic coding, long-running agents, 1M context, ZDR by default, and how teams should adopt it.
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Wise Developer Workflow + Multi-Agent Development Teams
How a wise developer works a new project — brainstorm, discuss, prototype, diagram, propose, ADR, PR, GitOps — plus Review Bots and Workstation multi-agent teams.
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How a Wise Developer Works on a New Project
The wise path for a new project: brainstorm, teammate discussion, prototypes, diagrams, proposals, ADRs, small PRs with Review Bots, and GitOps for production-grade quality.
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Amazon Bedrock, AgentCore, SageMaker & Q: Agents in Microsoft Teams
Implement Amazon Bedrock, Bedrock AgentCore, SageMaker, and Amazon Q, then launch a first business agent in Microsoft Teams — with requirements, tooling, and time boxes.
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Kubeflow + Argo CD: GitOps MLOps on Kubernetes
Pair Kubeflow and Argo CD for MLOps on Kubernetes: train and register models in Kubeflow, promote InferenceServices with GitOps, roll back with git revert.
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Large Language Models Explained: How LLMs Work and How to Run Your Own on Kubernetes
What are Large Language Models and how do they work? A clear, non-technical explainer for managers and engineers — tokens, embeddings, transformers, training and inference — plus production Kubernetes YAML to deploy your own LLM with Ollama and vLLM.
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Polyglot Benchmarks: Choosing the Right Tool for the Right Job
Stop default-stack bias. Polyglot Benchmarks compares njs, Lua, Python, Go, Rust, Bun, Java, and Kotlin on the same workloads — reproducible harness + live dashboard for architecture decisions.
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Couchbase upgrades with CAO pause gates: a support-friendly overview
A support-friendly, SRE-ready overview of Couchbase Server rolling upgrades under the Couchbase Autonomous Operator (CAO), using spec.paused to gate swap-rebalance one node at a time—so you can stabilize, validate health, and keep rollback options open.
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NebulaDNS Complete Feature Guide: k3s, Route53, Observability, and Enterprise DNS
Complete tour of NebulaDNS features: API-first control plane, Prometheus metrics, propagation gates, peer fingerprinting, DNSSEC roadmap, Helm/k3s operator story, and how to integrate with AWS Route 53 and CoreDNS.
Balinder WaliaRead NebulaDNS: Why Authoritative DNS Is a Game Changer in the AI Era
NebulaDNS is a safe-Rust authoritative DNS server with an API-first control plane, Prometheus metrics, propagation gates, and Kubernetes-native operations—built for visibility when AI services and agents depend on DNS more than ever.
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Hosting AI Models on AWS Bedrock and Azure AI Foundry: Cost Control That Scales
Run production AI on AWS Bedrock and Azure AI Foundry with clear patterns for model choice, caching, batching, quotas, and FinOps—so innovation does not blow the cloud bill.
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NebulaCR: Enterprise OCI Registry, Observability, and Compliance Without Compromise
Professional overview of NebulaCR: Rust OCI registry with nebula-registry and nebula-auth, zero-trust OIDC for humans and CI, SCIM lifecycle, Prometheus and OpenTelemetry, multi-region replication, pull-through cache, and Kubernetes Helm deployment—synthesised from the upstream docs/ and README.
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NebulaCB: Enterprise-Grade Couchbase Management That Saves the Day
How NebulaCB, the open-source Couchbase mission control from nebulacb.org, helps enterprises upgrade fearlessly, validate XDCR and data integrity, run Kubernetes-native operations, and use local AI (Ollama) for RCA—so teams ship changes without losing data or sleep.
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AI-Powered Database Troubleshooting: Intelligent Monitoring, Anomaly Detection, and Auto-Remediation
Leverage AI and machine learning for automated database troubleshooting, anomaly detection, query optimization, and intelligent alerting across MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Redis, and Couchbase in production environments.
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Couchbase High Availability in Production: XDCR, Kubernetes Operator, and Multi-Region Deployment
Complete guide to running Couchbase Server in high availability production environments with XDCR multi-region replication, Couchbase Autonomous Operator on Kubernetes, across AWS, Azure, GCP, and bare metal k3s with Rancher.
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Production Database Backup Strategies That Actually Work: MySQL and PostgreSQL
Battle-tested database backup strategies for MySQL and PostgreSQL in production. Covers physical and logical backups, PITR, WAL archiving, automated scheduling, cloud storage, and disaster recovery across AWS, Azure, GCP, and k3s.
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Longhorn Storage for Production k3s Clusters: Dynamic PVC Expansion, Replication, and Disaster Recovery
Complete production guide for Longhorn distributed storage on k3s/Rancher clusters. Covers dynamic PVC expansion, multi-region replication, backup to S3/GCS/Azure, disaster recovery, and performance tuning for database workloads.
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MongoDB High Availability in Production: Replica Sets, Sharding, and Kubernetes Operators
Complete production guide for MongoDB high availability using Replica Sets, Sharding, MongoDB Community Kubernetes Operator, and Percona Operator across AWS, Azure, GCP, and bare metal k3s with Rancher.
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