Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

LocalStack lets you run SQS, Lambda, and S3 locally in Docker — but there's a hidden trap: OpenTelemetry's default AWS propagator doesn't work with free LocalStack. Here's how to set up end-to-end local testing with working trace propagation. Prathamesh works as an evangelist at Last9, runs SRE stories - where SRE and DevOps folks share their stories, and maintains o11y.wiki - a glossary of all terms related to observability.

Last year, at the annual conference for an open source framework you've definitely heard of, I walked up to the founder in a room outside the main stage. He was hunched over his laptop, frantic. We've known each other for a few years. "What's going on? Is everything okay?" He looked up with the specific shade of white people only get when they realize they've made a big mistake.

ChatGPT costs $0 to $200+/month depending on the plan. Compare Free, Go, Plus, Pro, Business, and Enterprise pricing, plus API costs and what GPT-5.5 changes.

This is what production teams see happening. A vertical pod autoscaler recommendation gets applied automatically. Resource requests come down a notch across a namespace. The cost dashboard registers a small cost savings win. A few minutes later, health checks start failing. Pods enter crash loops.

Years back I sat in on a platform evaluation with a customer who spent forty-five minutes of the meeting focusing on one thing: their custom PHP content management system. They had opinions about the CMS. Strong opinions. They had benchmarks, a migration plan, a proof of concept. They had a diagram. They had questions about the deployment pipeline for this CMS that were, for a single application, more thoroughly considered than most organizations' entire infrastructure strategies.

Cloud native cost optimization requires rethinking how you track containers, serverless, and microservices spend. Here's a framework for 2026.

I live in Manchester, England now. I moved here from Texas last summer (which is its own story), but the thing I wasn't prepared for is how the Industrial Revolution isn't history here. It's the city itself. And if you're American like me, you might need to hear this: the Industrial Revolution didn't start in the US. It started here. Manchester is where the modern world was born. You see it everywhere. The old cotton mills converted into apartments.