A three-way comparison of the infrastructure-as-code tools that actually matter in 2026: the Terraform/OpenTofu fork that split one tool into two, and Pulumi's bet that real programming languages beat a config DSL. The architectural differences honestly, the state story, where each genuinely wins, and what is worth migrating.
Platform-Engineering
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Terraform vs OpenTofu vs Pulumi in 2026 -
Keycloak in Production: Realm Design, Federation, Kubernetes HA, and the Operational Reality of Running Your Own Identity Provider A comprehensive guide to running Keycloak in production: realm design strategies, client scopes and protocol mappers, LDAP/AD federation, authentication flows with WebAuthn and passkeys, Kubernetes HA deployment with the Operator, theme customization, and the operational reality nobody warns you about.
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AWS CDK Deep Dive Construct levels L1/L2/L3, stacks and environments, custom constructs, CDK Pipelines, escape hatches, testing, and an honest CDK vs Terraform comparison.
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AWS IAM: Permission Boundaries, SCPs, and Least Privilege at Scale IAM policy evaluation logic, permission boundaries, Service Control Policies, IAM Access Analyzer, ABAC with tags, and the common misconfigurations that lead to privilege escalation.
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AWS Systems Manager: Beyond Parameter Store Session Manager for SSH-free access, Run Command for fleet operations, Patch Manager, Automation runbooks, State Manager for configuration drift, and the full no-bastion-host architecture.
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Crossplane: Kubernetes-Native Cloud Infrastructure Managed Resources, Composite Resources, Claims, XRDs, and Compositions in depth. Provider auth, composition functions, ArgoCD integration, and an honest comparison with Terraform.
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etcd: The Brain of Kubernetes What lives in etcd, Raft consensus and quorum, backup and restore with etcdctl/etcdutl, compaction and defragmentation, the NOSPACE alarm, sizing guidelines, and the disaster recovery playbook.
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HashiCorp Packer: Golden AMIs and Immutable Infrastructure HCL2 build templates, multi-builder parallelism, provisioners, post-processors, HCP Packer lineage tracking, and building a production AMI pipeline in GitHub Actions.
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Kubernetes Debugging in Production A systematic approach to CrashLoopBackOff, OOMKilled, Pending pods, DNS failures, network policy blocks, and certificate errors — with the exact commands to run at each stage.
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Port: The Internal Developer Portal That Works Out of the Box A deep dive into Port (getport.io) — the SaaS internal developer portal. Covers blueprints, software catalog, self-service actions, scorecards, the Ocean integration framework, and an honest comparison with Backstage.
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Radius: Microsoft's Open-Source Application Platform for Cloud-Native Teams A comprehensive deep dive into Radius — the CNCF sandbox application platform that separates developer concerns from infrastructure concerns. Covers the application model, Recipes, Environments, Connections, the rad CLI, architecture, and how it compares to Crossplane, Score, and Humanitec.
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Score: Developer-Centric Workload Specification Score lets developers write a single score.yaml that deploys to Docker Compose locally and Kubernetes in production — without rewriting config for each environment.
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Argo CD and GitOps in Production: App of Apps, Rollouts, and Multi-Cluster Management A deep dive into Argo CD in production: the App of Apps pattern for managing entire clusters, progressive delivery with Argo Rollouts, RBAC for multi-team environments, multi-cluster management, and drift detection.
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Internal Developer Platforms with Backstage: Building the Golden Path How to build an Internal Developer Platform with Spotify's Backstage: setting up the software catalog, scaffolding golden-path templates, publishing TechDocs, and wiring up plugins for a self-service developer experience.
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Production Readiness Reviews: A Framework for Shipping Services That Don't Break A comprehensive guide to production readiness reviews—covering the PRR process, checklists for reliability, observability, security, and operations, SLO requirements, runbook standards, and how to build a lightweight PRR culture that scales without becoming bureaucracy.
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Self-Hosted GitHub Actions Runners: Ephemeral, Scalable, and Cost-Effective CI A deep dive into self-hosted GitHub Actions runners: deploying ephemeral runners on Kubernetes with Actions Runner Controller, build caching strategies, security hardening, and a real cost comparison against GitHub-hosted runners.
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Crossplane: Infrastructure as Kubernetes — Composites, Providers, and Replacing Terraform A comprehensive guide to Crossplane — the Kubernetes-native control plane for infrastructure. Covers providers, managed resources, composite resource definitions, compositions, claims, RBAC, and running a production platform that lets developers self-serve cloud resources safely.
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Developer Portals with Backstage: Catalog, Scaffolding, TechDocs, and Plugins A practical guide to Backstage — setting up the software catalog, creating service templates for self-service scaffolding, writing TechDocs, building plugins, and deploying Backstage to Kubernetes.
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Ephemeral Environments: Preview Deployments, Branch Environments, and Testing in Isolation Ephemeral environments spin up a complete, isolated copy of your application for every branch or pull request — automatically. This guide covers the patterns, tooling, and trade-offs for building preview deployments that actually improve your development workflow.
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Internal Developer Platforms: Building the Golden Path A practical guide to designing and building an Internal Developer Platform — self-service infrastructure, service templates, environment management, and the abstractions that let product teams ship without becoming Kubernetes experts.
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Kubernetes Operators Deep Dive A comprehensive guide to writing production-grade Kubernetes operators — CRD design, controller-runtime reconcile loops, finalizers, status conditions, event handling, leader election, and a complete testing strategy.
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Multi-Cluster Kubernetes: Fleet Management, Cross-Cluster Service Discovery, and Traffic Routing A practical guide to running multiple Kubernetes clusters — when and why to go multi-cluster, fleet management with Cluster API, workload distribution with Karmada, cross-cluster service discovery, and traffic routing strategies.
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Platform Engineering vs DevOps: What Changed and Why It Matters A clear-eyed look at what Platform Engineering actually is, how it differs from DevOps, why the shift happened, and how to build a platform team that developers actually want to use.
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Talos Linux: The Immutable, API-Driven Kubernetes OS with No SSH A comprehensive guide to Talos Linux — the minimal, immutable OS designed exclusively for Kubernetes. Covers the architecture, bootstrapping clusters from scratch, machine configs, day-2 operations, upgrades, and why no SSH makes your infrastructure more secure and reproducible.