Infrastructure

Rising Infrastructure Quality with YAML & JSON Schemas If you work in operations, DevOps, or platform engineering, you’re probably drowning in YAML files. Kubernetes manifests, Ansible playbooks, GitLab CI configurations, Helm charts—the list goes on. These YAML files control everything from cluster management and configuration to CI/CD pipelines and application deployments. But here’s the problem: YAML is notoriously forgiving. A typo, a missing field, or an incorrect indentation might not show up until you try to apply that configuration—and by then, it’s often too late. This is where JSON schemas come in, even though you’re working with YAML. ...

Introduction: When All Else Fails, Layer by Layer This week, I found myself knee-deep in troubleshooting Grafana Labs telemetry containers that refused to start properly in an OpenShift cluster (loki, mimir, prometheus, tempo, otel collector, spring boot services, etc.). The workloads looked good, the containers were running, but the telemetry data simply wouldn’t flow. Sound familiar? After hours of fruitless searching and even getting blocked by AI assistance (yes, even Claude couldn’t crack it), I realized I was in need of applying long learned principles. That’s when I decided to document the mental framework I developed over years of debugging network issues. ...