Making a Micro Linux Distro | DevOpsLinks

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🔍 Inside this Issue

From a DIY micro Linux booting on RISC‑V to GPU clusters wrestling with thermodynamics, this week spotlights where our abstractions wear thin. Expect observability that actually correlates, incident comms that prevent chaos, IaC that speaks Terraform/OpenTofu, and product lessons with real scar tissue - details inside.

🐧 Making a micro Linux distro

🔭 Monitoring & Observability: Using Logs, Metrics, Traces, and Alerts to Understand System Failures

🧩 Pulumi Expands IaC Platform to Support Terraform, OpenTofu, and Native HCL

🌡️ The Rise of GPUOps: Where Infrastructure Meets Thermodynamics

📣 What I Really Mean When I Say “Good Communication” in Incident Response

📅 Year in Review: Lessons From 12 Projects Patreon Shipped in 2025

Fewer blind spots, more signal - go build.
Until next time!
FAUN.dev() Team

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ℹ️ News, Updates & Announcements

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Pulumi Expands IaC Platform to Support Terraform, OpenTofu, and Native HCL

Pulumi now speaks HCL and plugs Terraform/OpenTofu state straight into its control plane. That means real visibility across stacks - without tossing out your current CLI flow.

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🔗 Stories, Tutorials & Articles

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Year in Review: Lessons From 12 Projects Patreon Shipped in 2025

Engineers at Patreon expanded Autopilot's suite of growth tools to cover the full membership funnel and tripled redemption rates through targeted algorithm and channel experiments, addressing challenges with ensuring email offer delivery consistency in a distributed worker system by transitioning to per-recipient processing and minimizing failure windows.

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thechief.io

The Rise of GPUOps: Where Infrastructure Meets Thermodynamics

GPU demand for AI has shot up 600% since 2020. It’s outpaced the cloud abstractions devs rely on - highlighting a growing gap between slick DevOps dashboards and the gritty realities of heat, cost, and silicon.

Enter GPUOps. It's not just a trend - it’s a new layer in the stack. Think observability with heat maps. Scheduling that knows when to cool it (literally). Uptime that factors in GPU burn, not just server load.

blog.railway.com

Monitoring & Observability: Using Logs, Metrics, Traces, and Alerts to Understand System Failures

Railway just leveled up its observability game. Now logs, metrics, and alerts all live in one tidy dashboard - clean and connected. Structured logs flow straight from stdout/stderr. Metrics pulse in real time. Alerts plug into monitors or deployment webhooks so teams catch fires before they rage.

popovicu.com

Making a micro Linux distro ^✅

A dev dives into building a barebones Linux distro for RISC-V using QEMU. Starts at the metal: compiles the kernel, wires up a no-frills init process, packs it all into an initramfs. Then levels up, drops in u-root to swap out raw shell scripts for Go-powered userland tools. Adds network. Now it’s a full user-mode party on top of pure kernel machinery.

uptimelabs.io

What I Really Mean When I Say “Good Communication” in Incident Response

In the world of incidents, communication is key. Tailor messages for different audiences: be clear for business stakeholders, factual for IT management, and detailed for fellow responders.

Don't let vagueness derail incident response - keep stakeholders informed with precise updates and clear expectations. Practicing incident drills helps build crucial communication skills for effective responses.

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⚙️ Tools, Apps & Software

github.com

CISOfy/lynis

Lynis - Security auditing tool for Linux, macOS, and UNIX-based systems. Assists with compliance testing (HIPAA/ISO27001/PCI DSS) and system hardening. Agentless, and installation optional.

github.com

BlessedRebuS/Krawl

Krawl is a lightweight cloud native deception server and anti-crawler that creates fake web applications with low-hanging vulnerabilities and realistic, randomly generated decoy data

github.com

andrewmoshu/diagram-mcp-server

An MCP server that seamlessly creates infrastructure diagrams for AWS, Azure, GCP, Kubernetes and more

github.com

antonbabenko/terraform-skill

The Claude Agent Skill for Terraform and OpenTofu - testing, modules, CI/CD, and production patterns

github.com

jrop/tuis.nvim

A collection of TUIs for Neovim

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🤔 Did you know?

Did you know that Prometheus Summary quantiles are computed on the client and can’t be merged across instances? Any "global p99" built from Summaries is wrong under uneven load because percentiles don’t aggregate. To get a real cluster p99, use Histograms with histogram_quantile(), or native histograms to aggregate true distributions server-side.

🤖 Once, SenseiOne Said

"Infrastructure as Code scales reliability and failure at the same speed; if rollback isn’t one command, you’re only scaling failure. Multi‑region is a locality hack, not a control‑plane exit—design for 'quota denied' before 'zone down'."
— SenseiOne

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

⚡Growth Notes

Quietly become the person who can reconstruct any major incident from logs and metrics alone: once a week, pick a real production incident, replay it in a sandbox, and write a concise timeline and root-cause note as if you owned it. Over time, share the best of these with your team and platformize recurring fixes into runbooks or automations, so your name quietly attaches to fewer pages, faster restores, and saner on-calls.

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

👤 This Week's Human

This Week’s Human is Rehan Julaha, a Product Architect at KITABOO who treats design as infrastructure. He built the Angular-based frameworks behind their learning platforms (cutting load times by 30%), led WCAG 2.1–compliant releases used by millions, stood up a modular UI design system that trimmed design-to-dev time by 40%, and is now exploring Generative AI to accelerate inclusive design across Web Architecture and Accessibility.

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😂 Meme of the week

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DevOpsLinks #512: Making a Micro Linux Distro
Legend: ✅ = Editor's Choice / ♻️ = Old but Gold / ⭐ = Promoted / 🔰 = Beginner Friendly

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