Datacenters in Space are a Terrible, Horrible, no Good Idea! | DevOpsLinks

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📝 The Opening Call

The TIME Person of the Year cover for 2025 has arrived, and it's a powerful tribute to the "Architects of AI."

The illustration features: Jensen Huang (Nvidia), Sam Altman (OpenAI), Lisa Su (AMD), Elon Musk (xAI), Mark Zuckerberg (Meta), Demis Hassabis (Google DeepMind), Dario Amodei (Anthropic), and Fei-Fei Li (Stanford/World Labs).

It's an iconic image, but we all know the hard truth behind the glamour: While these faces represent the vision and the capital, the real foundation is cobuilt by the developers and engineers working in the trenches. Most importantly, none of this would be possible without the Open Source contributors.

These people are the real architects!

ℹ️ I shared this same thought publicly. If it resonates with you, the discussion is happening on LinkedIn as well.

Have a great year ahead!
Aymen, @FAUN.dev()

🔍 Inside this Issue

Agents stopped pretending and started shipping while the internet tipped toward post‑quantum, bot-saturated traffic, and yes, someone still wants a datacenter in orbit. From hardened base images and cleaner GitOps diffs to an AWS outage autopsy and cheaper Lambdas, this batch is pure operational leverage, dive in.

🏆 100 GitHub Projects That Defined 2025: A Community-Driven Ranking
🌐 2025 Internet Trends: Explosive AI Crawling Growth and the Rise of 30+ Tbps DDoS Attacks
⚙️ ArgoCD diffs at scale
🐳 Docker Brings Production-Grade Hardened Images to Developers at No Cost
🚨 Race Condition in DynamoDB DNS System: Analyzing the AWS US-EAST-1 Outage
💸 You don’t need NAT gateway to deploy Lambda into VPC
🛠️ Designing a Scalable Serverless Contact System with AWS and Terraform
🛰️ Datacenters in space are a terrible, horrible, no good idea.
📘 The Complete Bash Scripting Course - Full Length Guide to learning the Bash Shell

Ship smarter, spend less, break fewer things.

Have a great week!
FAUN.dev() Team

⭐ Patrons

faun.dev

DevSecOps in Practice | A Hands-On Guide to Operationalizing DevSecOps at Scale

Throughout these pages, you'll discover how to effectively weave security into every stage of your software development lifecycle, using proven DevSecOps practices and powerful tools. We'll share practical steps, real-world examples, and clear guidance to help your teams collaborate more effectively, reduce security vulnerabilities, and speed up your delivery without sacrificing safety.

DevSecOps in Practice is for every developer, operations engineer, security engineer, and anyone else involved in the software development lifecycle who wants to get their hands dirty, learn from each step, and, most importantly - start building. Because when you "just do it," you don't only learn faster; you also create solutions that are robust, resilient, and secure from the ground up.

You don't need to be a security expert to start implementing the practices in this guide. The code snippets and examples are designed to be easy to understand and follow, the security concepts are explained in a way that is accessible to everyone, the tools used are open-source and widely available, and the infrastructure is accessible to everyone.

Welcome to a more responsible DevOps implementation. Welcome to the world of DevSecOps.

👉 Spread the word and help developers find you by promoting your projects on FAUN. Get in touch for more information.

ℹ️ News, Updates & Announcements

faun.dev

2025 Internet Trends: Explosive AI Crawling Growth and the Rise of 30+ Tbps DDoS Attacks

Cloudflare's 2025 Radar Review dropped a few spicy shifts in how the internet actually moves.

Post-quantum encryption now shields 52% of human web traffic. It’s not mainstream yet, but it’s past the tipping point. Meanwhile, AI bots cranked activity up 15×, with Googlebot leading the charge—no surprise there.

Starlink traffic doubled, thanks to a rollout across 20+ new countries. In automation land, Go-powered clients now push 20% of API calls. Quiet, fast, everywhere.

Nearly half of major internet outages? Government takedowns. And IPv6? Still crawling worldwide-except in India, where it’s flying.

What’s the big picture? Encryption's evolving, bots are colonizing, satellites are taking the backhaul. The shape of the network is shifting under our feet.

faun.dev

Docker Brings Production-Grade Hardened Images to Developers at No Cost

Docker rolled out Docker Hardened Images (DHI) - tight, secure base images baked with SBOMs, SLSA Level 3 provenance, and open CVE tracking. Think slim, auditable, and built to survive.

There’s a free tier, plus enterprise flavors with FIPS/STIG hardening, and Extended Lifecycle Support (ELS) that stretches CVE patching up to five years after the distro calls it quits.

What’s actually happening: Docker's pushing security left - baking trust into the base layer. It's a quiet but seismic shift for container image pipelines.

👉 Enjoyed this?Read more news on FAUN.dev/news

🐾 From FAUNers

faun.dev

100 GitHub Projects That Defined 2025: A Community-Driven Ranking ^✅

FAUN·dev() published its top 100 dev tools of 2025, ranked by signal from newsletters like DevOpsLinks, Kala, Kaptain, and VarBear. Clear trend: the AI toy phase is over. Real agents are landing.

Agentic systems - the kind that actually do things, not just pitch demos - are taking off. They're standardizing around the Model Context Protocol, which lets agents plug straight into real infra, tooling, and production.

👉 Got something to share? Create your FAUN Page and start publishing your blog posts, tools, and updates. Grow your audience, and get discovered by the developer community.

⭐ Sponsors

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🎯 10% off all hoodies with code FAUNDEV10 (apply at checkout)
⏰ Offer ends Sunday, Jan 11 at midnight

👉 Check this out!

👉 Spread the word and help developers find you by promoting your projects on FAUN. Get in touch for more information.

🔗 Stories, Tutorials & Articles

taranis.ie

Datacenters in space are a terrible, horrible, no good idea.

A former NASA engineer - now a Google Cloud AI infra alum - rips apart the idea of building GPU datacenters in orbit. His verdict: space is a terrible server rack. Power delivery? A nightmare. Heat dissipation? Worse in a vacuum. Radiation? Frying time.

Even a 200kW solar rig (think ISS-sized) could barely run 200 GPUs. For context, OpenAI's Norway datacenter is aiming for 100,000.

engineering.monday.com

ArgoCD diffs at scale

Monday.com ditched ArgoCD's built-in manifest diffing. Instead, they wired up a custom CI renderer that pre-renders Helm charts using real cluster data. Then it compares the desired states across Git branches.

The kicker: diffs go to a UI with custom grouping support. Reviews get easier. New devs get unstuck faster.

medium.com

Designing a Scalable Serverless Contact System with AWS and Terraform

TravelEase Inc., a growing travel company, significantly improved customer inquiries handling by replacing a basic mailto: link with a modular, serverless, cloud-native system managed with Terraform. This new system automated message validation, processing, storage, and notifications using Lambda functions, DynamoDB, and SES, providing reliability and scalability previously lacking.

carriagereturn.nl

You don’t need NAT gateway to deploy Lambda into VPC

AWS just made a big dent in NAT gateway bills. You can now run Lambda in VPCs with IPv6 and an egress-only Internet gateway - no more always-on NAT draining your wallet.

Keep the private subnets locked down. Still get outbound Internet access. IPv6 handles the traffic, slicing out the NAT middleman.

infoq.com

Race Condition in DynamoDB DNS System: Analyzing the AWS US-EAST-1 Outage

A long AWS smackdown in US-EAST-1 traced back to a ticking time bomb in DynamoDB’s automated DNS system. The flaw torpedoed EC2 networking, hobbled Lambda and Fargate, and dragged down the Network Load Balancer. Endpoints ghosted. Configs stalled. Everything snowballed.

AWS says they’ll upgrade EC2 throttling and tighten up race conditions.

👉 Got something to share? Create your FAUN Page and start publishing your blog posts, tools, and updates. Grow your audience, and get discovered by the developer community.

🎦 Videos, Talks & Presentations

youtube.com

The Complete Bash Scripting Course - Full Length Guide to learning the Bash Shell

Bash scripting course and guide created by Dave Eddy. Learn the Bash Shell and master beginner all the way up to advanced Bash scripting techniques.

⚙️ Tools, Apps & Software

github.com

ran-isenberg/aws-lambda-env-modeler

AWS-Lambda-Env-Modeler is a Python library designed to simplify the process of managing and validating environment variables in your AWS Lambda functions.

github.com

jj-vcs/jj

A Git-compatible VCS that is both simple and powerful

github.com

arm/metis

Metis is an open-source, AI-driven tool for deep security code review

github.com

0xfurai/peekaping

Open Source Uptime Kuma Alternative

👉 Spread the word and help developers find and follow your Open Source project by promoting it on FAUN. Get in touch for more information.

🤔 Did you know?

Did you know that Cloud Spanner deliberately pauses every write using a step called commit-wait to guarantee external consistency? The pause lasts for the TrueTime uncertainty window, typically around a few milliseconds, which creates a hard lower bound on write latency that can grow during clock resyncs or multi-region setups. Stale reads can bypass this wait, but every write must pay it to keep global ordering correct.

🤖 Once, SenseiOne Said

"The cloud makes capacity elastic; failure domains stay stubborn. We remove single points of failure in servers, then rebuild them in pipelines, IAM, and the on-call rotation."
— SenseiOne

(*) SenseiOne is FAUN.dev’s work-in-progress AI agent

⚡Growth Notes

Pick a domain most people avoid because it's dull (permissions, quotas, cost models, eval pipelines). Mastery there creates asymmetric leverage because few competitors exist.

Each week, we share a practical move to grow faster and work smarter

👤 This Week's Human

This Week’s Human is Katheline Jean-Pierre, a career coach who has coached over 15,000 women through a program at Google that still runs today. She helps women in Tech and ambitious professionals execute career pivots, build sought-after skills, navigate corporate systems, and grow side businesses.

💡 Engage with FAUN.dev on LinkedIn — like, comment on, or share any of our posts on LinkedIn — you might be our next “This Week’s Human”!

❤️ Thanks for reading

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DevOpsLinks #510: Datacenters in Space are a Terrible, Horrible, no Good Idea!
Legend: ✅ = Editor's Choice / ♻️ = Old but Gold / ⭐ = Promoted / 🔰 = Beginner Friendly

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