DevOps Daily Newsletter - Week 45, 2026

Hi there, here's what we published this week, plus a new game and fresh challenges to start your week.

Blog Posts

15 Minutes to 5: What Happens When You Move iOS CI From M1 to M4

The Wikipedia iOS app's build and 503 unit tests took a median 15.4 minutes on GitHub's M1 runner, and switching to M4 brought that down to 5.6. In partnership with Bitrise.

Terraform 1.17's -minimal-refresh: 202 API Calls Down to Zero, and the Drift Goes Quiet Too

Terraform 1.17 can now skip the refresh for every resource you did not change, and we measured what that does to API calls and drift reports on a real setup.

Base64 Explained: 3 Bytes In, 4 Characters Out, Zero Secrecy

Every 3 bytes become 4 characters and nothing is hidden, which is worth knowing the next time you see it in a Kubernetes Secret or a JWT.

GitLab.com's 60-Requests-an-Hour Limit Is Live, and the Headers Won't Warn You

We sent anonymous requests to GitLab.com until the new per-IP limit blocked us, and the response headers gave no warning before it kicked in.

LiteLLM 1.107.0 Was Built From a Lookalike Fork: What PyPI Provenance Can and Cannot Tell You

The poisoned release came out of the real release pipeline, fed from a fork one hyphen away, so we look at what PyPI provenance proves and where it stops.

Moving Authorization Out of Your App Code: If-Statements vs Cerbos vs SpiceDB, Measured

We built one permission model as if-statements, as Cerbos policies and as a SpiceDB relationship graph, then measured what changes when the rules leave your app code.

Featured Games

Git Concepts Simulator

Practice Git commands in a browser terminal while a visual model shows what each one does to your working directory, staging area and history.

Git Merge Conflict Simulator

Read real conflict markers and the three index stages in a safe browser lab, so the next conflict at work feels routine.

News Digests

DevOps Weekly Digest - Week 44, 2026

This week's notable updates from Kubernetes, cloud native tooling, CI/CD, IaC, observability and security, rounded up so you can get through them in one sitting.

Comparisons

Cilium vs Calico

A side-by-side look at how the two CNIs handle Kubernetes networking and security, starting with eBPF versus iptables, to help you pick one for your clusters.

Guides

Introduction to Packer

Install Packer 1.16, write your first HCL2 templates and build AWS AMIs and Docker images, step by step.

Quizzes

GitOps with Argo CD: Multi-Environment Repository Structure Quiz

See how well you know the ways to structure Git repositories when Argo CD deploys to dev, staging and production.

Flashcards

Multi-Region Active-Active Architecture on AWS

Go over the patterns and trade-offs of running active-active workloads across AWS regions, from traffic routing to data replication.

Happy learning, The DevOps Daily Team