Allow loading remote contents and showing images to get the best out of this email.FAUN.dev's DevOps / SRE / Platform Engineering Weekly Newsletter
 
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DevOpsLinks
 
This week in DevOps, with Dolly the Cow
 
 
📝 A Few Words
 
 
I wrote a book so you can stop renting your AI

Last August, OpenAI retired GPT-4o overnight and moved everyone to GPT-5. People who had built their daily work around a fast, predictable model woke up to a slower one that behaved differently, with no way back. This June, a US export control directive forced Anthropic to cut Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for every customer at once. Teams lost the models they were building on in an afternoon, for reasons that had nothing to do with their own work.

None of those people did anything wrong. They just did not own what they ran. The model, the price, and the rules sat in someone else's hands, and any of the three could move without warning.

My new book exists because I got tired of that arrangement.

Local AI Engineering with Ollama: Run, understand, customize, fine-tune, and build agentic apps on your own hardware.

This is a practical book, not a survey of the field. With no history lessons or predictions about where AI is headed. You install the runtime, pull a model, and by the end you have three things sitting on your own disk:

  • A custom model packaged with a Modelfile that does one job the same way every time, that a teammate can pull and run with zero setup.
  • A fine-tuned model trained with QLoRA and Unsloth, then exported to GGUF and run in Ollama.
  • A chat application you build in nine passes until it becomes an advanced agent, with conversation history, streaming, context trimming, LangChain summarization, Redis caching, mem0 long-term memory, function calling, and tools served over MCP.
  • And more!

Along the way you learn what a model is actually doing (tokens, weights, embeddings, the KV cache, quantization), how to size a model against your RAM or VRAM before you download it, how to drive Ollama from its HTTP API, and how to control the context window so the model stops silently forgetting where a long chat started.

The stack you practice on: Ollama, Unsloth, LangChain, Redis, Docker, mem0, and Open WebUI.

Who it's for

If you can run a command and edit a file, you are qualified. No ML degree required, and none wanted. This is the book I needed when I started, written for the developer in the middle, past the marketing pages and short of the research papers.

What makes it different

Every command in the book was run on a real machine. Every output you see, the JSON responses, the error messages, the token counts, the training logs, came from an actual session, not from docs I trusted and pasted in. When Ollama behaved differently from its own documentation, I say so and pin the version it happened on...etc Where accuracy and polish pulled apart, accuracy won. That is the part that ages well.

28 modules, 91 sections, lifetime access and updates, a built-in AI assistant (SenseiOne) for your questions, and a 30-day money-back guarantee.

Get your copy

👉 On FAUN.sensei: Local AI Engineering with Ollama. Use code OLLAMA20 at checkout for 20% off. The code expires July 8, 2026 at 11:59 PM, so move before then.

👉 On Amazon.com: paperback and Kindle editions are live here (also available in the other marketplaces: .fr .de ..etc)

👑 If you want to stop renting and start owning, this is for you. Get a model running tonight, and keep going.

The rest follows from there.
 
 
🔍 Inside this Issue
 
 
AI is speeding up infra changes while simultaneously torching maintainers and security assumptions, so the real question is what becomes your source of truth and your blast radius. This set runs from old-school pragmatism (memcached, Nginx) to new-school containment (microVMs) with a detour through a Linux desktop workflow people are weirdly passionate about.

🧱 IaC Isn't Dying. AI Makes it More Important
🪟 I Finally Tried Niri, The New Way Of Tiling Linux Users Are Going Crazy About
🧠 In praise of memcached
🧨 Linus Torvalds: AI Can’t Think Like a Programmer
🛡️ Nginx as a Reverse Proxy
🧪 Run isolated sandboxes with full lifecycle control: AWS Lambda introduces MicroVMs
🔒 Why your microVM sandbox solves a particular problem very well, but not the agent security problem.

Ship fast, but keep your boundaries sharper than your tooling.

Stay safe out there.
FAUN.dev() Team
 
 
⭐ Patrons
 
iacconf.com iacconf.com
 
Turn Terraform modules into self-service building blocks for humans and AI agents.
 
 
Terraform modules are often designed around what they do, not how easily humans or AI agents can use and reuse them. Join Jinger Meilani of MNTN to learn how to design IaC interfaces for humans, AI agents, and whatever comes next. Leave with concrete patterns that reduce misuse and help non-infrastructure developers get up to speed faster.

Register for free. July 14 | 12 PM EDT
 
 
👉 Spread the word and help developers find you by promoting your projects on FAUN. Get in touch for more information.
 
⭐ Sponsors
 
faun.dev faun.dev
 
Your Argo CD knowledge ends where production begins
 
 
The tutorials stop at "apply this, watch it sync". Then comes drift, RBAC lockouts, repo-server OOM, secrets sitting in Git. GitOps the Hard Way, with Argo CD covers that half: 12 chapters from an empty cluster to a working pipeline, every command tested live.

20% off with GITOPS20 until June 30 - get your copy now or grab the paperback on Amazon (search the title on your local Amazon elsewhere).
 
 
👉 Spread the word and help developers find you by promoting your projects on FAUN. Get in touch for more information.
 
🔗 Stories, Tutorials & Articles
 
jchri.st jchri.st
 
In praise of memcached
 
 
Choose memcached as the default cache because it keeps the cache boundary clear.

It offers no persistence, so your app must rebuild cached values from the source of truth after a restart or eviction. It also pushes failure handling into client code, so engineers must decide how the app behaves during a cache miss, timeout, or outage.

With Redis, teams can add persistence, replication, and richer data structures, then start depending on the cache like a database without giving it the care a database needs.
 
 
sanyamserver.online sanyamserver.online
 
Nginx as a Reverse Proxy
 
 
How Nginx works as a reverse proxy, from its worker architecture to rate limiting, HTTP/2, security headers, and tuning workers to match the server.
 
 
aws.amazon.com aws.amazon.com
 
Run isolated sandboxes with full lifecycle control: AWS Lambda introduces MicroVMs
 
 
AWS gave developers a Lambda option for running user- or AI-generated code inside stateful Firecracker microVMs.

The key use case: AI coding agents can execute untrusted snippets, install dependencies, keep a workspace warm, and destroy the environment after the task ends.
Firecracker gives each task a stronger isolation boundary than a shared runtime, but teams need policy controls around the microVM as well.
 
 
devops.com devops.com
 
IaC Isn't Dying. AI Makes it More Important
 
 
Teams that use AI to generate infrastructure code need IaC as the system of record that platform teams govern. Engineers can produce changes faster, so platform teams must absorb more work through review, policy, testing, integration, and rollout.
 
 
decodebytes.substack.com decodebytes.substack.com
 
Why your microVM sandbox solves a particular problem very well, but not the agent security problem.
 
 
Use MicroVMs to contain host-escape risk from coding agents. You still need capability controls: grant the agent access to specific files, scoped credentials, approved services, and permitted mutations after you place repos and credentials inside the VM.
 
 
itsfoss.com itsfoss.com
 
I Finally Tried Niri, The New Way Of Tiling Linux Users Are Going Crazy About
 
 
Niri lets you keep tiled windows in a scrollable strip, so you can add, move, and focus windows without rebuilding your layout. With Dank Linux, you get that workflow as a complete desktop, with polished defaults and the pieces you expect already wired up.
 
 

👉 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 youtube.com
 
Linus Torvalds: AI Can’t Think Like a Programmer
 
 
Linus Torvalds Speaks on AI and how it affects the Linux kernel development and open source. You'll also hear how AI has been flooding the Linux kernel and creating maintainer burnout.
 
 
 
⚙️ Tools, Apps & Software
 
github.com github.com
 
harshagr64/tfcount
 
 
A CLI tool to summarize and analyze Terraform plan outputs by resource type and action (create, update, delete).
 
 
github.com github.com
 
link-society/localaz
 
 
Vibecoded local Azure emulator inspired by LocalStack (AWS) and localgcp (GCP)
 
 
github.com github.com
 
apple/container
 
 
A tool for creating and running Linux containers using lightweight virtual machines on a Mac. It is written in Swift, and optimized for Apple silicon.
 
 
github.com github.com
 
SagarMaheshwary/reqlog
 
 
Fast CLI for searching, tracing, and streaming logs across files, Docker containers, and remote hosts using request IDs, trace IDs, and key/value search.
 
 
github.com github.com
 
microsoft/coreutils
 
 
Coreutils for Windows: Installer & Packaging
 
 

👉 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 the Linux load average counts more than processes waiting for the CPU? Unlike classic Unix, Linux also includes tasks stuck in uninterruptible sleep, usually blocked on disk or network I/O, which is why a server can show a load of 50 while its CPUs sit almost idle. The number measures demand for resources, not just CPU saturation.
 
 
🤖 Once, SenseiOne Said
 
 
"The cloud sells you infinite capacity, then bills you for every shortcut you took to stay stateless and boring. DevOps is just the discipline of making the cheapest failure the one you meant to have. Reliability is what’s left when you stop negotiating with physics and start negotiating with your own team’s habits."
- SenseiOne
 

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

 
😂 Meme of the week
 
 
 
 
❤️ Thanks for reading
 
 
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DevOpsLinks #534: Linus Torvalds: AI Can't Think Like a Programmer
Legend: ✅ = Editor's Choice / ♻️ = Old but Gold / ⭐ = Promoted / 🔰 = Beginner Friendly

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