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Deric Abel

Layton, Utah

Director of Platform Engineering & Cloud at Ignisware. Twenty years across Linux, DevOps, and cloud; now building Kubernetes platforms on AWS, GitOps delivery, and compliance programs for growing companies.

Why your website goes down when marketing sends an email

Corporate mail scanners prefetch every link the moment a campaign lands, and thousands of HEAD requests reach your origin in seconds. How to confirm it from the logs and fix it in layers, from the web server to the WAF.

Stopping email-blast HEAD storms from taking down a legacy news site

Every marketing email took the site down for minutes as mail-client link scanners flooded the origin. Five rounds of fixes across nginx, the WAF, cache headers, and PHP-FPM timeouts took p99 from 2.7 s to 1.2 s and made the busiest scanner month on record the most reliable.

Why your CI pipeline is slow, and why it is probably not the tests

Queue wait, toolchain setup, and caches that quietly do nothing usually cost more than the test suite. How to profile a pipeline stage by stage, and the fixes that took one from nine minutes to under three.

Cutting a Laravel monorepo's CI from nine minutes to three without touching a test

A nine-minute pull request gate became 2m 44s, queue wait dropped from over a minute to two seconds, and about 70 engineer-hours a month came back, for roughly $150 a month in runners.

Crew: SOC2 Type 1 Compliance & AWS Cost Optimization

A sub-10 person fintech passed SOC2 Type 1 and cut AWS spend 42% without pulling engineers off product.

DevOps Homework Assessment: Star Wars API Challenge

This assignment is designed to assess your understanding of DevOps principles and practices. You'll build a solution that interacts with the Star Wars API, packages it into a Docker container, and (optionally) implements a CI/CD pipeline. This assignment is open for the month of February. Successful submissions