u/nerd3n

After working with Kubernetes in production, I've noticed that some of the most annoying incidents aren't caused by obvious failures. They're often caused by small configuration decisions that look perfectly reasonable during review.

Things like:

• missing resource requests/limits
• incorrect probes
• overly permissive RBAC
• missing PodDisruptionBudgets
• unsafe container configuration
• incorrect readiness behaviour
• services without appropriate timeouts
• configuration drift between environments

I'm curious what the DevOps community has actually encountered in production.

What's one Kubernetes configuration mistake that caused you a real incident?

I'd especially like to hear about the less obvious ones that aren't caught by the usual linters.

I’ve been working on a project called Sentinel for quite some time, and recently I decided to be more open about why I’m actually building it.

Sentinel is a SaaS for analyzing infrastructure configurations.

You can give it things like Dockerfiles, Docker Compose files, Kubernetes manifests, Helm charts and Ansible configurations, and it looks for potential problems in security, reliability, configuration and operational practices.

One of the things I wanted to avoid was making yet another “AI looks at your YAML and gives you some advice” product.

So the core of Sentinel is a deterministic Rule Engine with 200+ rules. The analysis itself is based on rules, while LLMs are used to explain findings and help developers understand how to fix them.

I'm building most of the project myself and using AI agents heavily during development. They help me with implementation, boilerplate, tests, documentation and exploring approaches, while I keep the architecture, infrastructure decisions and final validation under my control.

But Sentinel isn't just a technical side project for me.

I'm currently living in Russia, and one of my main goals is to use this project to create a realistic path toward relocation.

I started looking at the numbers recently.

Goal: $4,800
Current budget: $720
Raised so far: $0

That's only 15% of the target, so there is still a long way to go.

I'm not presenting this as a success story — quite the opposite. The project is still being built, I'm trying to find product-market fit, and I have no idea yet whether Sentinel will become a serious business.

But that's exactly why I want to document the process.

I want to see whether one person with limited resources can take a technical product from an idea → MVP → first users → revenue, and eventually use it as a foundation for moving to another country.

If you're building a side project yourself, I'd genuinely like to hear what you're working on.

And if you're a DevOps/SRE/platform engineer, I'd especially appreciate feedback on what you would expect from a tool like Sentinel before you'd actually trust it with your infrastructure.

Current progress: $720 / $4,800.

After working with Kubernetes in production, I've noticed that some of the most annoying incidents aren't caused by obvious failures. They're often caused by small configuration decisions that look perfectly reasonable during review.

Things like:

• missing resource requests/limits
• incorrect probes
• overly permissive RBAC
• missing PodDisruptionBudgets
• unsafe container configuration
• incorrect readiness behaviour
• services without appropriate timeouts
• configuration drift between environments

I'm curious what the DevOps community has actually encountered in production.

What's one Kubernetes configuration mistake that caused you a real incident?

I'd especially like to hear about the less obvious ones that aren't caught by the usual linters.

Hi everyone!

Maybe anyone can write self experience about relocate from Russia? I'm try a find job 2.5 months but have 0 offers