Kiril Urbonas

AI Engineer

105 articles published

AIOps & Self-Healing Infrastructure in 2026: A Practical Guide

A practical guide to AIOps and self-healing infrastructure: the maturity ladder from alert to autonomous remediation, observability as the foundation, anomaly detection, Kubernetes-native self-healing, an operator-driven remediation loop, agentic SRE, and the guardrails that keep automation safe.

Kiril Urbonas·21

Read article

••3 weeks ago

Argo CD & GitOps Best Practices in 2026: Deployments You Can Trust

A production-focused Argo CD and GitOps guide: declarative Applications and ApplicationSets, app-of-apps, sync waves and hooks, automated self-heal and prune, progressive delivery with Argo Rollouts, projects/RBAC, and secure secrets — with copy-paste examples.

Kiril Urbonas·15

Read article

••0 months ago

CircleCI Best Practices in 2026: Fast, Safe Pipelines

A production-focused CircleCI guide: orbs, reusable commands and executors, workflows with fan-in/fan-out, contexts and OIDC for secrets, layered caching, test splitting, approval jobs, and dynamic config — with copy-paste examples.

Kiril Urbonas·2

Read article

••last month

Jenkins Pipeline Best Practices in 2026: Builds You Can Trust

A production-focused Jenkins guide: declarative pipelines, shared libraries, ephemeral agents on Kubernetes, scoped credentials, parallel stages, input approvals, post-block rollback and notifications, and Configuration as Code — with copy-paste examples.

Kiril Urbonas·10

Read article

••last month

GitLab CI/CD Best Practices in 2026: Pipelines You Can Trust

A production-focused GitLab CI/CD guide: include/extends templates, rules and workflow, needs DAGs, cache vs artifacts, protected environments, masked/protected variables and Vault, built-in security scanning, and review apps — with copy-paste examples.

Kiril Urbonas·7

Read article

••last month

GitHub Actions Best Practices in 2026: Workflows You Can Trust

A production-focused GitHub Actions guide: reusable workflows, least-privilege permissions, keyless OIDC to the cloud, SHA-pinned actions, environments with approvals, concurrency-safe deploys, and CodeQL/Dependabot gates — with copy-paste examples.

Kiril Urbonas·8

Read article

••5 months ago

End-of-Week Engineering: Why Smart Tech Teams Don’t Ship Major Changes on Friday

A practical risk-management framework for release timing, Friday deployment policies, progressive delivery, and how elite teams protect reliability and people.

Kiril Urbonas·31

Read article

••5 months ago

Kubernetes Cost Optimization for Teams: FinOps Tactics That Actually Work

Cut Kubernetes spend without hurting reliability using a practical FinOps playbook for rightsizing, autoscaling guardrails, showback, and weekly waste cleanup.

Kiril Urbonas·20

Read article

••5 months ago

SRE Error Budgets in Practice: Shipping Fast Without Burning Reliability

Error budgets turn "how reliable should we be?" into a number both product and SRE can spend. Here is how we set, alert on, and enforce them.

Kiril Urbonas·23

Read article

••5 months ago

Platform Engineering with Backstage: Build a Useful Developer Portal

How to implement Backstage with real templates, scorecards, and golden paths so internal platform work reduces delivery friction.

Kiril Urbonas·21

Read article

••5 months ago

GitHub Actions for Monorepos: Fast CI Without Pipeline Chaos

A practical pattern for monorepo CI with path filters, matrix builds, caching, and deployment guards that keep feedback fast as teams scale.

Kiril Urbonas·16

Read article

••5 months ago

Azure DevOps Best Practices in 2026: Build Pipelines You Can Trust

A production-focused, example-rich guide to Azure DevOps: template-driven YAML, immutable artifact promotion, secure OIDC service connections, environment approvals, canary rollouts with automatic rollback, IaC governance, and DORA-driven delivery reliability.

Kiril Urbonas·834

Read article