This week on Ship It Weekly, GitHub Actions can now run eligible Linux jobs on AWS as well as Azure, so allowlists and Entra Conditional Access policies that only trust Microsoft ranges can break. The Brotli decoder bug (CVE-2026-111497) landed on CISA's exploited list, and it reaches past Node.js to Python Brotli, Bun, Envoy, Istio, a Go port and .NET. A campaign called Gheist is using stolen GitHub tokens to push ci-sync branches that print Actions secrets past log masking, then delete the run. And attackers are dropping AGENTS.md files into Downloads folders to hijack AI coding agents.

The thread: each one is an inventory question. Which services decompress Brotli, which allowlists assume CI runs on Azure, which OIDC trust policies accept any branch, and which laptops have started an agent in Downloads?

In the lightning round: GitHub Actions workflow lockfiles are generally available, Railway disclosed a breach of its internal systems, Tailscale 1.104.4 fixes four security bulletins, and Datadog moved its US1 status page to its own Status Pages product.

The human closer, from Bill Duncan: "Twenty minutes in, you haven't started diagnosing anything. You've been doing archaeology." Write down who owns it before the pager asks.

Highlights

• GitHub Actions on AWS: why the same job can pass, then fail

• Sync runner IP ranges from GitHub's meta API, not one cloud's

• Brotli: a decoder bug your HTTP stack may run for you

• Gheist: what private repos and OIDC trust let through

• AGENTS.md in Downloads: an instruction file is code now

• Service catalogs and the "what depends on me?" question

Links

GitHub Actions multi-cloud compute: https://tsn.io/fJkLJ

Node.js October security releases (Brotli): https://tsn.io/BvZBU

Brotli CVE-2026-111497, affected libraries (Wiz): https://tsn.io/HJuKS

.NET out-of-band security updates: https://tsn.io/j0Xwf

Gheist steals GitHub Actions secrets (Wiz): https://tsn.io/nunEs

AI agents hijacked via the Downloads folder (Forever Security): https://tsn.io/qnwuc

Actions workflow lockfiles GA: https://tsn.io/M84uA

Railway security disclosure: https://tsn.io/21t0j

Tailscale security bulletins: https://tsn.io/GvZxR

Who Owns This? (Bill Duncan): https://tsn.io/LFrzc

SRE Weekly #540: https://tsn.io/O8tpO

This week's On Call Brief: https://tsn.io/HqfCP

More episodes and show notes: https://tsn.io/NqkdP

On Call Brief: https://tsn.io/Gpz2d

LMGT Awards: https://tsn.io/lAERA

This is a guest conversation episode of Ship It Weekly, separate from the weekly news recaps.

In this Ship It Conversations episode, I talk with Darko Fabijan about what starts breaking after the pull request when AI writes more of the code, what should sit between an AI agent and production, and why his answer is more automation.

Darko is the CEO of SuperPlane and co-founder of Semaphore, the CI/CD platform. At SuperPlane, he's working on how to give AI agents write access to production in a controlled way.

We start with what AI-generated code does to delivery. Pull requests are bigger and more frequent, reviewers can't keep up, and Darko points to a Faros AI report that shows defects and incidents going up. He describes AI as alien technology that dropped from the sky, landing in processes built for people who review code eight hours a day.

His main hypothesis is a deterministic layer between AI agents and production, with scoped access that goes through approval. I bring up the rubber stamping problem with human approvals, and his reply is that humans hallucinate too. So he wants a risk score on every change. Renaming a bucket scores low. Deleting an S3 bucket or an RDS instance scores red.

Then we get into the glued-together ops tooling most teams run on. Darko doesn't think anything is wrong with it. When I ask how SuperPlane differs from Argo Workflows or n8n, he says he wants agents and humans on the same plane, and he'd onboard an agent like a new engineer: give it an identity, let it look around, and show it what it can do. We also cover team-scoped agents, compliance at AI speed, and docs where every line traces back to what produced it.

We finish on where to start. Darko says read-only first: he pretends to be super stupid, asks a lot of dumb questions, and says "onboard me." For the first write operations, he'd pick loops you can measure with a number, like latency, GitHub Actions speed or CVE count, tested on a copy of production or staging first.

The big takeaway: AI didn't break software delivery. It showed how much of it still runs at human speed. Darko's answer is more automation, with a deterministic layer and a risk score between AI and production.

Highlights

• What breaks after the pull request when AI writes more of the code

• A deterministic layer between AI agents and production

• Rubber stamping, and a risk score for every change

• Onboarding an AI agent like a new engineer

• The dam and the river: compliance at AI speed

Links

Darko Fabijan on LinkedIn: https://tsn.io/DySr5

Darko Fabijan on X: https://tsn.io/xJGhN

SuperPlane: https://tsn.io/o08yM

Semaphore: https://tsn.io/jiHmd

Faros AI's Acceleration Whiplash report: https://tsn.io/5ZCR3

Argo Workflows: https://tsn.io/oyTYF

n8n: https://tsn.io/nloFF

More episodes and show notes: https://tsn.io/NqkdP

On Call Brief: https://tsn.io/Gpz2d

LMGT Awards: https://tsn.io/lAERA

This is a guest conversation episode of Ship It Weekly, separate from the weekly news recaps.

In this Ship It Conversations episode, I talk with Jinger Meilani about Tabletop Retro, her way of turning an engineering retrospective into a tabletop role-playing game, and why a little silliness gets teams to give honest answers.

Jinger is a Senior Software Engineer in DevOps at Mountain. She says Tabletop Retro brings together three things she loves: world building, psychological safety on teams, and engineering enablement.

We start with why she reinvented the retro at all. She was bored of them, and even the themed ones got rote. At a previous company, the team rotated who ran the retro, and her turn landed around Halloween, so she built a story around the team. She calls the result retro plus plus plus. The usual formats and outcomes are all still there, inside a story.

A lot of it comes down to silliness. Jinger compares it to hiding vegetables in a fruit smoothie: it disarms people, and she gets honest answers, sometimes while everyone thinks they're talking about something else. That's also why she won't run one during a fire. People have to feel comfortable before they'll speak their truth, so the flame-breathing dragon can wait.

Then we get into how one is built. A Tabletop Retro is a series of chapters, and each chapter holds part of the story and at least one activity. Players fill out character sheets, and each in-game race maps to a technical archetype, like a Goliath for a high-level systems thinker or a gnome for a tinkering automation engineer. Afterward the team talks through what those picks say about their strengths and weaknesses. She presents it like a storybook, in Lucidchart or Canva over Zoom.

Characters cut both ways. For some people, an orc is permission to say what they'd never put on a retro board, because it's not really how they feel. They're just an orc. Others find role-play intimidating, so she reads the room: improv for an outgoing teammate, a line on screen for someone else, or no speaking part at all. If you want to try one, start with the questions, not the world. Where is the team unaligned? When does communication break down? Then keep the setting small. Kids trick-or-treating is plenty.

The big takeaway: a Tabletop Retro is still a retro, and Jinger holds it to a higher bar. If everyone has fun and tells you something honest, and then nothing changes, it failed. Someone still has to do the work.

Highlights

• Why she calls it retro plus plus plus

• Hiding vegetables in a fruit smoothie

• Why you don't run one during a fire

• Chapters, character sheets and technical archetypes

• "I'm just an orc," and why role-play makes some people nervous

• Reading the room: improv, on-screen lines, or no lines at all

• Start with the questions, then keep the world small

• Fun with no follow-through is a failed retro

Links

Tabletop Retro, Jinger's framework: https://tsn.io/wXdtL

Jinger Meilani on LinkedIn: https://tsn.io/xn8Jr

Jinger's IaCConf talk, Designing IaC Interfaces That Work for Humans, AI Agents, and Whatever Comes Next: https://tsn.io/5b4DM

More episodes and show notes: https://tsn.io/NqkdP

On Call Brief: https://tsn.io/Gpz2d

LMGT Awards: https://tsn.io/lAERA

This week on Ship It Weekly, LiteLLM's release pipeline was hijacked again: stolen GitHub CLI tokens from three engineers changed the pipeline, kicked off the release and approved it, and a credential-stealing 1.107.0 went out to PyPI and Docker Hub. GitHub put a package firewall into public preview, with advisory and supply chain checks and a cooldown for new releases. PHP fixed PHP2Shell, two critical core runtime bugs (CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619) that someone tried to exploit four days before disclosure. And eMudhra, a certificate authority in India, found out the private keys for eight intermediate certificates could be worked out from its own public certificates.

The thread: most of this came through things you depend on but don't run. A library's release pipeline, the registry you pull from, the runtime under your app, and the trust store in your images.

In the lightning round: another GitLab CVSS 10 (CVE-2026-110264), Google's report on the europe-west2 London outage, AWS taking its European Sovereign Cloud off the global backbone on October 24, and a GitHub audit log change that can quietly break SIEM rules.

The human closer, from Brent Chapman: page on what users actually do. Your users don't care how your machines feel. They care whether they can log in.

On Monday, Jinger Meilani joins me to talk about running retros like a tabletop RPG.

Highlights

• LiteLLM 1.107.0: two stolen identities passed a two-person approval

• GitHub package firewall: advisories, attestations and a cooldown

• PHP2Shell: an exploit attempt four days before disclosure

• Patching PHP is easy, finding all of it is hard

• eMudhra: CA private keys worked out from public certificates

• Page on what users feel, not how the machine feels

Links

LiteLLM 1.107.0 compromise (Wiz): https://tsn.io/yQtmu

GitHub package firewall in public preview: https://tsn.io/QjofJ

PHP2Shell, CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619 (Help Net Security): https://tsn.io/GUyop

Eight eMudhra CA keys compromised (The Hacker News): https://tsn.io/K2jqM

GitLab 19.5.1 patch release: https://tsn.io/0wsPX

Google Cloud europe-west2 incident report: https://tsn.io/nVk2N

AWS European Sovereign Cloud independent operation: https://tsn.io/gKnQl

GitHub secret scanning updates: https://tsn.io/JDGmT

Stop paging on how your machines feel (Brent Chapman): https://tsn.io/MAItM

SRE Weekly #539: https://tsn.io/XAsKz

This week's On Call Brief: https://tsn.io/nBAVg

More episodes and show notes: https://tsn.io/NqkdP

On Call Brief: https://tsn.io/Gpz2d

LMGT Awards: https://tsn.io/lAERA

This is a guest conversation episode of Ship It Weekly, separate from the weekly news recaps.

In this Ship It Conversations episode, I talk with Rob Koch about what accessible cloud native actually looks like, why sign language is still one of the hardest problems in AI, and why the fastest way to make your tooling accessible is to hire deaf engineers.

Rob is a senior principal at Slalom, an AWS Hero, and co-chair of the CNCF Deaf and Hard of Hearing Working Group. Rob is Deaf, and his ASL interpreter, Amelia Fruehsamer, voices his answers. Special thanks to Amelia for interpreting the conversation.

We start with an analogy Rob comes back to all episode: cloud native is the toolbox, and platform engineering is the workbench. Then we get into what's overhyped about AI, the guardrails it still needs, and what auditable AI observability looks like.

A big part of the conversation is accessibility in practice. Rob explains how captions pushed for deaf attendees ended up helping neurodivergent folks too, and what conferences get wrong: accessibility planned at the very end instead of the start, and the real cost of interpreters versus captions.

Then we get technical. Rob walks through using Kubernetes and Kubeflow to train models that recognize sign language, and why it's so hard: regional signs, lighting, skin tone and backgrounds, and a camera that can't tell which way a hand is facing. His joke: we don't have AGI until AI understands sign language.

The big takeaway: start with people, not a checklist. Hire deaf and hard of hearing engineers, ask them how they want to work, and your tools get more accessible because they're in the room.

Highlights

• Cloud native as the toolbox, platform engineering as the workbench

• What's overhyped about AI, and the guardrails it still needs

• What accessible cloud native means in practice

• Captions that help far more people than you planned for

• What conferences get wrong about accessibility, and what it costs

• Kubernetes and Kubeflow for sign language recognition

• Gesture-based computing and why speech-to-text had a 30-year head start

• Where to start: hire deaf engineers

Links

Rob Koch on LinkedIn: https://tsn.io/4qmFo

Rob Koch on GitHub: https://tsn.io/Mbxrs

Amelia Fruehsamer (Rob's ASL interpreter) on LinkedIn: https://tsn.io/UJB88

CNCF Deaf and Hard of Hearing Working Group: https://tsn.io/tB1lS

CNCF conference accessibility best practices: https://tsn.io/BZvpv

CNCF Merge Forward: https://tsn.io/QPVNQ

Kubeflow: https://tsn.io/4OVKf

More episodes and show notes: https://tsn.io/NqkdP

On Call Brief: https://tsn.io/Gpz2d

LMGT Awards: https://tsn.io/lAERA

This week on Ship It Weekly, GitHub Actions workflow lockfiles land in public preview, pinning actions and their dependencies to exact commits. GitLab shipped a critical patch release for CVE-2026-97229, a CVSS 10 CI/CD regex flaw that could let an unauthenticated attacker run code on the server. Google published its final report on two Cloud Storage incidents in us-central1, including a recurrence caused by an incomplete rollback. And Linus Torvalds pushed an experimental kernel branch with page-cache patches built using Claude Code, as maintainers debate dropping the mandatory AI attribution tag.

The thread this week: know what you're actually running, from the commit you reviewed to the state a rollback really left behind and code someone can still explain.

In the lightning round: a record Patch Tuesday with more than 1,400 CVEs and an actively exploited Windows Shell bypass, GitHub AI Scan for pull requests and agentic autofix going GA, AWS Strands Box, an open-source agent sandbox that keeps real credentials out of the agent's environment, and a Microsoft 365 outage through Global Secure Access.

The human closer comes from Paul LaPosta's “Your error budgets don't know AI exists.” AI has split shipping a change from understanding it, and SLOs don't measure comprehension. Your SLO can tell you the service is up. It cannot tell you whether anyone still understands it.

Programming note: Ship It Weekly turns one next month, so expect more conversations over the next couple of months, usually two a week, starting Monday with Rob Koch.

Links

GitHub Actions workflow lockfiles

GitLab 19.4.2 / 19.3.5 / 19.2.8 patch release

Google Cloud Storage incident report

Linus Torvalds and Claude Code (Phoronix)

Linux drops the Assisted-by requirement (Phoronix)

October 2026 Patch Tuesday

GitHub AI Scan for pull requests GA

Agentic autofix GA

AWS Strands Box

Microsoft 365 Global Secure Access outage

Your error budgets don't know AI exists (LeadDev)

This week's On Call Brief

This is a guest conversation episode of Ship It Weekly, separate from the weekly news recaps.

In this Ship It Conversations episode, I talk with Erik Osterman of Cloud Posse about Terraform modules, infrastructure as code frameworks, internal developer platforms, and why AI makes conventions more valuable, not less.

Erik is the founder and CEO of Cloud Posse, which has published more than 180 open source Terraform modules, and he hosts Cloud Posse's weekly DevOps Office Hours.

We start with what AI has done to open source infrastructure projects, then get into what makes a good Terraform module: consistent naming, a consistent interface, not so small that it wraps a single resource, and not so large that it has a hundred inputs nobody can test.

We also talk about CloudFormation, Pulumi, and why HCL's constraints helped build the module ecosystem. Erik explains where Crossplane fits, and why accounts, IAM, networking, DNS and certificates all come before the cluster.

A big part of the conversation is frameworks. Erik argues that nobody actually runs "vanilla Terraform," because Terraform alone doesn't handle state layout, promotion, authentication, tool installation or repository structure. Every team ends up building its own framework, usually undocumented. We talk about Terragrunt, Atmos, naming conventions, brownfield adoption, and breaking a monolithic root module into services.

Near the end, we get into AI and self-service. Erik's team now generates most of its infrastructure work with AI, and it works because the conventions, agent skills, MCPs and pipelines are already in place. Self-service doesn't have to mean another no-code platform.

The big takeaway: AI can generate infrastructure code faster than ever, but without conventions it is generating into chaos.

Highlights

• What makes a good Terraform module

• Root modules vs. child modules

• CloudFormation, Terraform, Pulumi, and why constraints helped HCL win

• Where Crossplane fits, and what has to exist before the cluster

• Why internal developer platforms like Backstage come after zero-to-one

• Why infrastructure as code needs frameworks, not just modules

• Agent skills, MCPs, and self-service without a no-code platform

Links

Cloud Posse: https://cloudposse.com

Atmos: https://atmos.tools

Cloud Posse on GitHub: https://github.com/cloudposse

DevOps Office Hours: https://tsn.io/2gq7v

Erik Osterman on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/osterman

More episodes and show notes: https://tsn.io/NqkdP

On Call Brief: https://tsn.io/Gpz2d

LMGT Awards: https://lmgt.org

This week on Ship It Weekly: Atlassian disclosed a critical arbitrary file access vulnerability affecting eight Data Center products, including Jira, Confluence, Bitbucket, and Bamboo. GitHub Copilot local sandboxing is now generally available, giving teams enforceable controls around filesystem, network, credentials, and local tooling. AWS published a deeper look at Lambda SnapStart for container images, including the operational risks of restoring initialized state. And Google Spanner Omni is now generally available, bringing Spanner outside Google Cloud and putting more of the availability responsibility back on the customer.

The bigger theme this week is control. Developer tools are production infrastructure. AI agents need real execution boundaries, not just instructions. Faster startup through snapshots means understanding exactly what state is being restored. And moving a managed database onto your own infrastructure gives you portability, but also gives you the pager.

In the lightning round: Citrix has a NetScaler SAML vulnerability under active exploitation. Cloudflare is working toward becoming a publicly trusted certificate authority. And attackers are actively scanning for Rejetto HFS servers vulnerable to a flaw that can lead to account takeover and remote code execution.

And the human closer comes from Lorin Hochstein and a recent Google Cloud networking incident. One part of the outage involved someone correctly following an incorrect procedure, while another involved someone incorrectly following a correct one. Training matters, but systems also need guardrails that keep normal human mistakes from turning into large outages. If your system only works when nobody makes a mistake, the system is the problem.

Links

Atlassian CVE-2026-21589

https://tsn.io/ZlqKv

GitHub Copilot Local Sandboxing

https://tsn.io/rQngM

AWS Lambda SnapStart for Container Images

https://tsn.io/uXqkK

Google Spanner Omni GA

https://tsn.io/GoZZ5

Citrix NetScaler CVE-2026-88779

https://tsn.io/yN5a9

Cloudflare Certificate Authority

https://tsn.io/egMN5

Rejetto HFS CVE-2026-61500

https://tsn.io/oQrkU

Google Cloud Networking Incident

https://www.tellerstech.com/go/s-dc989ad2/

There Was a Light That Never Went Out

https://www.tellerstech.com/go/s-cb0bc459/

This Week’s On Call Brief

https://tsn.io/8yaIY

Ship It Weekly

https://tsn.io/NqkdP

On Call Brief

https://tsn.io/Gpz2d