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The DevOps Odyssey, Part 6 — Closing the Loop with GitHub Auto-Tagging

originally posted at LinkedIn at November 13, 2025

In the last chapter, I left a promise — to make the system truly GitOps-native. To bridge the small but important gap between building images and updating manifests.

That loop is now closed.

Every time a Docker image for Job Winner or the photo app is built and pushed, GitHub Actions updates the Argo CD repository automatically. No manual tag edits, no pull requests waiting in the dark. The commit that produces the container now also defines its deployment.

The infrastructure finally breathes on its own.

Throwing remote triggers to upgrade Autobot

The DevOps Odyssey, Part 5: Migration of Job Winner and Release of the Photo App

originally posted at LinkedIn at Oct 23, 2025

In Part 4, I closed with a simple plan: migrate Job Winner into the cluster and build a photo app that would reconnect my creative and technical worlds. Those two threads finally came together — one practical, one personal — and in the process, the Odyssey took another quiet but meaningful turn.

DevOps meets Photography - all connected by Autobots.

Replatforming Airbyte: From Developer Laptop to EKS

originally posted at LinkedIn at July 25, 2025

In early-stage engineering teams, it's natural for tools to start out simple — often running on a single developer machine, just to get things moving. That’s how our Airbyte setup began: quick to spin up, good enough for testing connectors, and easy to iterate on.

But as our team grew and data pipelines became more embedded in how we operated, we knew it was time to treat Airbyte like real infrastructure. That meant moving beyond local environments and into a scalable, secure, and repeatable deployment.

We migrated Airbyte OSS to Amazon EKS, using Helm and AWS-native services like S3 and IAM Roles for Service Accounts (IRSA). Our goal wasn’t to fix something broken, but to build on what was working and make it production-ready—without sacrificing developer velocity.

This post shares how we did it, what we learned, and what you might want to consider if you’re operationalizing Airbyte (or any similar open-source tool) in a small but growing cloud-native team.

DevOps Clown sending laptop application to the Cloud

Helm Template Tips

Helm templates provide a powerful way to configure Kubernetes manifests dynamically. In this post, we’ll cover some useful tricks, including:

  • Handling optional maps

  • Setting default values

  • Using ternary expressions

  • Other useful Helm template functions

Helm Template Tips