Weekly Readings: DevOps Deep Dive

January 12, 2026 • Blog • 5 Min Read

This is my first attempt at this sort of thing. This newsletter will be a small look into the topics I personally cover in any given week. This includes updates on projects, research results, and anything else I may find interesting.

Next week I’ll cover in detail the current state of my main project. This week, I’m sharing a curated look at the architecture and cloud-cost strategies I’ve been digging into. If these topics are of any interest to you make sure to check out next week to see how they’ll be implemented in an actual micro-service web application.

Here are links to the notes I made while reading these articles, the source URL’s are there too. The articles themselves came from newsletters I’m subscribed to or from independent researching.

The Must Read

If I had to pick 1 that everyone who saw this went and read it would without a doubt be the 12 Factor Application site.

I stumbled across it while researching scaling technologies. A Redditor claimed that you shouldn’t be worried about auto-scaling unless you plan on creating a fully compliant 12 Factor Application. I’m not sure that I’m 100% sold on that, however this is a powerful framework and I'm glad it got brought to my attention.

I can see myself revisiting this article and my own notes the next time I sit down to design a scalable system. It covers nearly every important topic when thinking about how a system will develop and grow throughout its lifetime, full of useful tips and sources for further reading/tools.

The 12 Factors are something every DevOps Engineer should be familiar with. If you haven’t been exposed to the framework definitely checkout my summary and ideally give the real thing a skim.

Configuration Data: What is a Secret?

"What is a Secret" was a nice skim. I think it covers too little to be as long as it is but I definitely learned from it. In Finet (current project, nearing end of development) I worried about the config (#3 of 12 Factor) way too late. As a result it’s clunky and unsafe and will require a ton of work to fully repair. "What is a secret" provides a helpful look into where protected/variable data is supposed to be stored and what kind of information needs to be where.

Read This If You’re Broke Too

"The Broke Students Guide to the Cloud" was also very helpful for me personally as it related back to Finet. I can summarize everything I learned from the article like this:

Create budget alert for $0.01
Use AWS Lambda over EC2 when possible and free to do so

I’ve ran into many problems with the t2.micro (even with the 2 GB of extra ram from the drive) because it’s just too micro! Lambda fixes this as well as not having a time limit for $0 bills (1 Year Free Tier / Account for free EC2 access). I’m going to implement Lambda into my next web app and see if it can replace the server-side processing, with a free non-AWS public host (like Netlify) and probably S3 buckets for persisting data.

Versioning: What’s wrong with “Latest”

Not only did the App Versioning article finally put a name to what I now know to be Semantic versioning (Major.Minor.Patch) but it also gave me a really good look into why we bother with versioning and the benefits it has for marketing and stability.