Deric Abel
One login for every internal tool: Authentik as the front door to a Kubernetes platform
Twenty-seven platform tools across two clusters, from Grafana to per-pull-request environments and AI sandboxes, behind one identity broker fed by Google Workspace and AWS Identity Center, configured entirely from Git.
OpenSearch vs PostgreSQL for application search: when Postgres is enough
Search engines earn their complexity at web scale. Below it, a well-indexed Postgres often wins on latency, cost, and operations. How to tell which side of the line you are on, and how to prove it with replayed production queries.
Preview environments per pull request on Kubernetes: what is actually hard
Creating an environment per pull request is a week of work. Living with fifty of them is the project. The options, the database problem, lifecycle and cleanup, and what we would do again after 1,470 deploys.
An AI prototyping sandbox where product teams ship in minutes
Product staff and their coding agents deploy sandboxed services in under five minutes. Ten days after launch, prototypes were running, a shadow cloud was being emptied, and two AI-built services had graduated into the managed platform under human review.
Replacing OpenSearch with PostgreSQL for a 25-million-record real estate data platform
Search that ran at a 3.1 second p90 on OpenSearch runs at 704 ms on PostgreSQL 18, validated row for row across 25 million records before cutover.
Building a GitOps platform on EKS for a national media and events company
84 ECS services, two clusters, one Git repo: how a media company went from click-ops to self-service pull request environments.