Platform Engineering
31 posts — newest first.
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Agent workflows belong in code, not just visual builders
OpenAI is winding down Agent Builder and platform Evals. Production agent workflows need code, tests, traces, and reviewable contracts.
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Your agent installs Markdown from the internet and runs it. We spent 20 years learning not to do that.
Agent skills are dependencies with none of the controls. What the 2026 research found, why scanners miss it, and seven fixes for platform teams.
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Round-robin is malpractice for LLM traffic: what the Inference Gateway actually fixes
The Gateway API Inference Extension is GA. Why a normal Kubernetes Service balances model servers badly, and how to tell if you need an InferencePool.
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GPU utilization is a lying metric: the unit economics of self-hosted inference
You can run a GPU at 100% utilization and waste most of it. The cost model that predicts your inference bill, and the five levers in payback order.
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Most of your AI platform's traffic doesn't need a frontier model
Small models got good enough in 2026. But the win isn't using them — it's making model choice a platform tier with a router, eval gate, and demotion path.
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MCP 2026-07-28 shipped: the stateless core is the headline, header routing is the story
The final MCP spec deletes sessions, mirrors requests into HTTP headers, and turns elicitation into multi-round-trip calls. What breaks, and what to audit.
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AI SRE is officially a category. Buy it like an SRE, not like a CIO.
Gartner's first Market Guide for AI SRE tooling projects 85% adoption by 2029. Six evaluation questions for cutting through the category hype.
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The biggest outages still start with a config change — and now agents write them
Fresh postmortems keep confirming it: config changes, not code, cause the largest incidents. Agentic ops multiplies the volume. Here's the defense.
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The EU AI Act blinked — your logging requirements didn't
The EU AI Act omnibus moved high-risk deadlines to 2027–28. The logging, oversight, and inventory work is still yours — and reliability needs it anyway.
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MCP is the hands, A2A is the handshake: the two-layer agent protocol stack
A2A hit v1.0 with 150+ orgs behind it. MCP connects agents to tools; A2A connects agents to each other. What the two-layer stack means for platform teams.
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The OWASP Agentic Top 10, translated for platform teams
OWASP's Agentic Top 10 reads like a security doc, but the mitigations are platform controls. Mapping all ten risks to infrastructure you already run.
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Agentic Resource Discovery: I Read the Spec, Then Published a Catalog
Google, Microsoft, and Hugging Face shipped Agentic Resource Discovery. The real ai-catalog.json schema, a working catalog, and the gotchas that break it.
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The Five Types of Agentic Memory (and When to Use Each)
Agentic memory is five things — working, episodic, semantic, procedural, entity — each with its own storage, eviction, and failure mode. A decision guide.
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Agentic AI Patterns: The Decision Guide (Part 1 of 3)
Six agentic AI patterns — ReAct, Plan-and-Execute, Critic, fan-out, HITL gate, Supervisor — with a decision flowchart for picking one before you build.
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Agentic AI Patterns: The Maturity Model (Part 3 of 3)
A five-level agentic AI maturity model, from manual to multi-agent mesh — with a self-assessment and where regulated industries should draw the line.
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Agentic AI Patterns: Where They Break in Production (Part 2 of 3)
Every agentic AI pattern looks clean in a demo. Where each one breaks in production, the signals you're hitting them, and mitigations that actually work.
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Making Claude Code Work with Locally Deployed Models
Claude Code can point at Ollama, vLLM, LM Studio, or any private endpoint. When that's the right call, exactly how to configure it, and what you give up.
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OKF: The Missing Context Layer for AI Agents
The Open Knowledge Format gives agents a structured vocabulary for what data they're touching and where it came from — auditable, not blind, reasoning.
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MCP goes stateless — what the 2026 release candidate means for your SRE tooling
The 2026-07-28 MCP release candidate deletes the session handshake for a stateless HTTP core and hardens OAuth. What changes for your agents, and when.
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Context engineering: the window is a budget, not a bucket
The context window is your agent's working memory, not a junk drawer. Four operations — write, select, compress, isolate — and a token budget you allocate.
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Agent sprawl is your next production incident
Teams shipping AI agents are recreating 2015's microservices sprawl with worse observability. The governance surface that contains it before it pages you.
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No anonymous inference endpoints — the MCP security principle you're probably violating
The NSA and NIST put MCP on notice: agents are a funnel for prompt injection and privilege abuse. Why 'no anonymous inference endpoints' — and how to comply.
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What is Site Reliability Engineering (SRE)?
A primer on Site Reliability Engineering — where it came from, how it differs from DevOps and Platform Engineering, and what changes as AI joins on-call.
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What are vector embeddings?
A primer on vector embeddings — how meaning becomes something you can search, cluster, and compare, and the failure modes you only see in evaluation.
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What is function calling (tool use)?
A primer on function calling — the JSON-schema contract that lets an LLM invoke your code. The request/response loop, parallel calls, and forced tools.
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What is prompt caching?
Prompt caching cuts repeated-prompt cost 50–90% and halves latency. How prefix matching works, TTL economics by provider, and what decides your hit rate.
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What is an AI agent? A primer for cloud engineers
A primer on AI agents — the perceive-reason-act loop, what separates an agent from a one-shot LLM call, and the classical agent types SREs now operate.
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What is Model Context Protocol (MCP)?
A primer on Model Context Protocol — the open standard that lets AI applications talk to tools through one interface. Hosts, clients, servers, transports.
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What is Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)?
A primer on Retrieval-Augmented Generation — grounding an LLM's answer in documents you trust. Indexing, serving, and the failure modes that bite.
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Mental models for applying AI to infrastructure
Tutorials answer how; mental models answer whether. Seven I use as the front gate before any LLM goes near a production system.
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The MCP gateway pattern: five jobs your agent runtime can't skip
Letting agents call MCP servers directly repeats the no-API-gateway mistake. The five jobs an MCP gateway must do, with reproducible patterns for each.