2026 Platform Engineering ⌛, PostgreSQL Optimizations 🏃, Human Native Joins Cloudflare ☁️

Platform engineering transitioned into an industrial standard by 2025, enabling mature organizations to halve time-to-market ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌  ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ 

Sign Up |Advertise|View Online TLDR Together With TLDR DevOps 2026-01-21 Granola: Turn your raw meetings notes into something awesome (Sponsor) Get one month free with code TLDR1MO What if you could be fully present at a meeting, but still have super-detailed notes focused on what matters to you? Granola takes your raw meeting notes and makes them awesome. It adds the full context from your conversations, so your "Q4 priorities?" notes becomes a full list.  It's like Apple Notes, except you have full transcription, searchable context, and one click to share. And it all happens on your Mac or your iPhone with no meeting bots. Try it once, and you'll be hooked. Use code TLDR1MO to claim your free month, including unlimited meetings notes + history. 📱 News & Trends GitLab Announces General Availability of GitLab Duo Agent Platform (4 minute read) GitLab Duo Agent Platform is now in general availability. The platform enables orchestrated AI agents across the full software lifecycle to address delivery bottlenecks beyond coding. It offers agentic chat, prebuilt and custom agents, governance controls, and usage-based pricing via GitLab Credits. Being a platform engineer in 2026: Career reality check (5 minute read) Platform engineering transitioned into an industrial standard by 2025, enabling mature organizations to achieve 20:1 developer-to-platform-engineer ratios and halve time-to-market. Average salaries, now at $160,000 in North America and $104,000 in Europe, reflect the role's democratization rather than devaluation. AI literacy has become a survival-level competency for practitioners. 🚀 Opinions & Tutorials What AI is actually good for, according to developers (5 minute read) This post discusses AI coding tools designed to protect developer flow with contextual, customizable help rather than chat-centered automation, prioritizing human judgment, learning, minimal interruptions, and refinement driven by feedback that removes tedium without disrupting creativity. Unconventional PostgreSQL Optimizations (13 minute read) Unconventional PostgreSQL techniques such as constraint_exclusion, function-based indexes on lower-cardinality expressions, virtual generated columns, and hash-backed exclusion constraints can significantly reduce query execution time, index size, and unnecessary full-table scans. These approaches outperform standard full-table scans and B-tree indexing in analytics-heavy and ad-hoc query workloads by better aligning indexes and constraints with actual query needs. 🧑‍💻 Resources & Tools Platform Engineering on Kubernetes: An Open Source-First Approach (Sponsor) The Manning book Platform Engineering on Kubernetes takes an in-depth look at the latest best practices and open source tools from the Kubernetes community, including: Multi-cloud infrastructure management with Crossplane Using Dapr for standard API distribution Implementing feature flags with OpenFeature Grab a free copy of the ebook from Chronosphere Terraform Skill (GitHub Repo) A new Claude Agent Skill for Terraform and OpenTofu has been introduced, offering comprehensive guidance on testing strategies, module patterns, CI/CD workflows, and production-ready infrastructure code for Claude Code users. agent-lightning (GitHub Repo) agent-lightning is an open-source framework for training and optimizing AI agents—enabling reinforcement learning (RL), automatic prompt optimization, supervised fine-tuning, and more—without requiring substantial changes to existing agent code. It works with virtually any agent framework (e.g., LangChain, OpenAI Agents SDK, and AutoGen) and provides modular components to collect agent execution data and iteratively improve agent performance via a decoupled RL training loop. 🎁 Miscellaneous Self-Driving DevOps? How Stakpak Tackles Infrastructure Complexity (5 minute read) Stakpak introduced an open-source DevOps agent aimed at making infrastructure more autonomous by securing secrets, preventing destructive actions with guardrails, and centralizing shared operational knowledge so AI can handle complex, non-coding DevOps tasks reliably. Making Very Small LLMs Smarter With RAG (7 minute read) Small, local LLMs can be effectively leveraged for niche development tasks by implementing Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG). This approach allows LLMs to generate accurate code snippets for the custom Nova Golang library, addressing limitations faced by larger commercial models unaware of such specialized projects. IP Addresses through 2025 (45 minute read) IPv4 is effectively "post-exhaustion" by 2025: the globally allocated public pool is flat to slightly shrinking (~3.687B allocated at end-2025, down ~237k on the year), remaining free space sits mostly in APNIC/AFRINIC, and scarcity is managed via NAT/CGNAT plus an active—but cooling—transfer market whose prices fell sharply through 2025. IPv6 keeps growing in deployment, but 2025 saw fewer and much smaller allocations (big drop in total /32s allocated), and the Internet's trajectory is still shaped by the client/server + NAT model rather than a return to universal, publicly reachable end hosts. ⚡ Quick Links Run tests in CI against a real environment (Sponsor) mirrord for CI lets you run tests against your staging or pre-prod Kubernetes environment without deploying code or spinning up test environments. Get faster, more reliable CI feedback at a lower cost. Learn more Human Native is joining Cloudflare (3 minute read) Cloudflare has acquired UK-based Human Native to expand licensed, high-quality AI data access and give content owners control over AI usage. Top 28 Kubernetes resources for 2026: Learn and stay up-to-date (2 minute read) This comprehensive guide for engineers on the Kubernetes and cloud-native ecosystem curates high-signal resources from fundamentals to advanced operations for building Internal Developer Platforms and running AI/ML workloads. 10 observability tools platform engineers should evaluate in 2026 (5 minute read) 32.8% of practitioners identify observability as a main focus. Love TLDR? Tell your friends and get rewards! Share your referral link below with friends to get free TLDR swag! https://refer.tldr.tech/3b85ceef/10 Track your referrals here. Want to advertise in TLDR? 📰 If your company is interested in reaching an audience of devops professionals and decision makers, you may want to advertise with us. Want to work at TLDR? 💼 Apply here, create your own role or send a friend's resume to jobs@tldr.tech and get $1k if we hire them! TLDR is one of Inc.'s Best Bootstrapped businesses of 2025. If you have any comments or feedback, just respond to this email! Thanks for reading, Kunal Desai & Martin Hauskrecht Manage your subscriptions to our other newsletters on tech, startups, and programming. Or if TLDR DevOps isn't for you, please unsubscribe.