Expert perspectives on DevOps,
AI & modern engineering

DevOps

Using Terraform Workspaces to Keep Infrastructure Consistent Across Environments

Infrastructure drift is something we run into constantly when starting a new client engagement. Production looks nothing like staging. Staging looks nothing lik…

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Alex Podobnik · Apr 15, 2026

DevOps

How NextLink Labs Builds Production AWS Infrastructure

Overview Every new AWS engagement at NextLink Labs used to start from scratch. Engineers assembled infrastructure from memory, past projects, or whatever patter…

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Alex Podobnik · Apr 07, 2026

Custom Software Development

Defending Your Rails App: Enabling Dependency Cooldowns to Prevent Supply Chain Attacks

On March 31, 2026, a North Korean state actor hijacked the npm account of an Axios maintainer and published two backdoored versions of one of the world's most p…

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Colin Soleim · Apr 06, 2026

DevOps

Observability Best Practices with Grafana Cloud

Introduction Observability is not monitoring. Monitoring tells you when something is wrong. Observability lets you ask arbitrary questions about your systems, i…

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Alex Podobnik · Mar 31, 2026

DevOps

Leveraging Hardened Docker Images: How We Stay Secure and Eliminate Image Maintenance Overhead

Why Hardened Images? The Default Is a Liability When developers choose base images freely, the result is always the same: a fragmented estate of ubuntu:latest, …

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Alex Podobnik · Mar 26, 2026

DevOps

Security Event Monitoring: From Reactive Alerts to Proactive Threat Detection

This guide is part of the NextLink DevSecOps Maturity Framework.

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Jordan Saunders · Mar 24, 2026

Cloud

How We Built a Weekly AWS Cost Digest Powered by AI

Stop reading raw Cost Explorer graphs. Let Claude write your FinOps briefing. The Problem With AWS Cost Explorery Every Monday morning, someone on your team ope…

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Alex Podobnik · Mar 19, 2026

DevOps

Application Performance Monitoring: A Strategic Guide to APM Maturity

This guide is part of the NextLink DevSecOps Maturity Framework.

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Jordan Saunders · Mar 13, 2026

Infrastructure Access Control Standards: Your Complete Maturity Guide for 2026

This guide is part of the NextLink DevSecOps Maturity Framework. Key Takeaways 82% of security breaches involve compromised credentials, making infrastructure a…

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Jordan Saunders · Mar 09, 2026

Infrastructure as Code Best Practices: 5 Security Patterns That Prevent Drift

Infrastructure as Code best practices eliminate configuration drift that silently undermines engineering organizations, creating cascading failures when manual …

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Jordan Saunders · Mar 05, 2026

Custom Software Development

Setting Up Your Ruby on Rails Monolith for AI Development

Introduction The AI revolution has arrived, and it's transforming how developers work with codebases. For teams maintaining large Rails monoliths with millions …

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Colin Soleim · Feb 19, 2026

AI

Your Engineers Are Already Running AI Agents. Do You Know Which Ones?

There's a big problem happening with companies adopting AI right now. They don't understand the full landscape of what tools are available or even what tools ha…

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Jordan Saunders · Feb 17, 2026