https://blog.devops-monk.com/tags/devops/Recent content in DevOps on Devops MonkHugoen-usSat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://blog.devops-monk.com/2026/05/monkkit-developer-tools/Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://blog.devops-monk.com/2026/05/monkkit-developer-tools/I was tired of bouncing between a dozen different sites just to format JSON or decode a JWT. One tab for a JSON formatter. Another for a Base64 decoder. Another for a DNS lookup. Another for an SPF validator. Browser full of bookmarks, half of them plastered with ads, most requiring an account to do anything useful. So I built MonkKit — a single place for all of them. 106 free developer tools across 10 categories.https://blog.devops-monk.com/2026/05/claude-code-plugins-guide/Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://blog.devops-monk.com/2026/05/claude-code-plugins-guide/Skills, agents, and hooks you add to .claude/ are powerful — but they are locked to one project. Every time you start a new repo you copy the same files, maintain them in multiple places, and drift out of sync. Claude Code plugins solve this: a plugin is a shareable, versioned package that carries all your customisations and can be installed in any project with one command. This post covers what plugins are, when to use them, and how to build a real one from scratch — a DevOps helper that ships a deployment skill, a pre-deploy safety hook, and an MCP server connection to your Kubernetes cluster.https://blog.devops-monk.com/2026/05/personalised-gifts-ecommerce-platform/Wed, 06 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://blog.devops-monk.com/2026/05/personalised-gifts-ecommerce-platform/Building an e-commerce site is one of those projects that sounds simple until you actually start. Payments, authentication, inventory, personalisation, image handling, email notifications, admin tools, live chat — each piece is its own rabbit hole. I built PersonalisedGifts, a full UK-market personalised gifts store from scratch, wiring all of these together into a single cohesive product. The site lets customers browse gifts by category (Mugs, Jewellery, Canvas Prints, Home Décor) or occasion (Birthday, Wedding, Christmas, New Baby), personalise their chosen item with custom text, images, fonts, or colours, and pay via Stripe (cards, Apple Pay, Google Pay, Klarna) or directly from their bank account via Tink’s open banking integration.https://blog.devops-monk.com/2026/05/claude-adaptive-thinking-guide/Sun, 03 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://blog.devops-monk.com/2026/05/claude-adaptive-thinking-guide/By default, Claude generates its response token by token without any deliberate planning step. For most tasks — answering a question, writing a function, explaining a concept — this is fine. The response comes quickly and it is good. For some tasks, it is not enough. Complex multi-step reasoning problems, ambiguous architecture decisions, intricate security analyses — these benefit from Claude thinking through the problem before committing to an answer. That is what extended thinking and adaptive thinking provide.https://blog.devops-monk.com/2026/05/claude-managed-agents-guide/Sun, 03 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://blog.devops-monk.com/2026/05/claude-managed-agents-guide/Building an AI agent that runs autonomously — browses the web, executes code, reads and writes files, persists memory across sessions — requires infrastructure. You need a sandbox, a process that can run for hours without your web server timing out, and a way to resume from where you left off after a network hiccup. Claude Managed Agents, launched in public beta in April 2026, offloads all of that to Anthropic.https://blog.devops-monk.com/2026/05/claude-models-guide-2026/Sun, 03 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://blog.devops-monk.com/2026/05/claude-models-guide-2026/Picking the wrong Claude model is expensive. Opus on every task costs 5x more than Sonnet for comparable results on most work. Haiku on a complex reasoning task produces worse output than just asking Sonnet. And if you are still using models from early 2025, some of them are deprecated — or will be soon. This guide covers every current Claude model, what each is good at, how much they cost, and a concrete decision framework for choosing the right one.https://blog.devops-monk.com/2026/05/claude-prompt-caching-guide/Sun, 03 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://blog.devops-monk.com/2026/05/claude-prompt-caching-guide/If you are calling the Claude API repeatedly with a large system prompt, a big document, or a long codebase context — and you are not using prompt caching — you are paying full price every time for content that has not changed. Prompt caching stores a prefix of your prompt server-side and charges 90% less to read it back on every subsequent request. For applications that repeatedly process the same context, this is the single highest-impact API optimisation available.https://blog.devops-monk.com/2026/05/spring-boot-4-complete-guide/Sun, 03 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://blog.devops-monk.com/2026/05/spring-boot-4-complete-guide/Spring Boot 4.0 was released on November 20, 2025. It is built on Spring Framework 7 and represents the most significant shift in the Spring ecosystem since the Jakarta EE migration in Spring Boot 3. The headline change is full modularisation — the single spring-boot-autoconfigure JAR has been split into 70+ granular modules. But that is just the start. This guide covers every change that matters, what breaks on upgrade, and what is genuinely new and useful.https://blog.devops-monk.com/2026/05/spring-boot-docker-guide/Sun, 03 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://blog.devops-monk.com/2026/05/spring-boot-docker-guide/There are three ways to containerise a Spring Boot application: a naive single-stage Dockerfile, a proper multi-stage Dockerfile with layered JARs, and Cloud Native Buildpacks. Each has different tradeoffs in build speed, image size, and maintenance overhead. This guide covers all three approaches, explains why layered JARs matter for CI/CD speed, and shows how to produce small, secure, production-ready images. The Problem with the Naive Dockerfile Most tutorials show this:https://blog.devops-monk.com/2026/05/spring-boot-kubernetes-guide/Sun, 03 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://blog.devops-monk.com/2026/05/spring-boot-kubernetes-guide/Running Spring Boot on Kubernetes is not just packaging the app in a container and deploying it. You need to configure health probes correctly, handle graceful shutdown so in-flight requests don’t get dropped, manage configuration without baking secrets into images, and make sure the JVM respects container memory limits. This guide covers the production-critical Kubernetes configuration for Spring Boot applications. Health Probes Kubernetes uses three probe types to manage pod lifecycle:https://blog.devops-monk.com/2026/04/stock-market-analysis-dashboard/Sun, 26 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://blog.devops-monk.com/2026/04/stock-market-analysis-dashboard/Most stock screeners cost $30–$200 per month. Bloomberg Terminal costs $24,000 per year. I built something that does a meaningful fraction of what those tools do — analysing 220+ UK and US stocks every hour, scoring them across six dimensions, detecting bearish warning signals, running insider trading checks via SEC EDGAR, and presenting everything in a React PWA — at zero ongoing cost. The platform is live at share.devops-monk.com. The full source is at github.https://blog.devops-monk.com/2026/04/claude-code-security-scanner/Sun, 26 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://blog.devops-monk.com/2026/04/claude-code-security-scanner/Tools like ESLint, Semgrep, and Bandit catch what they are programmed to find: known patterns, common injection strings, deprecated API calls. They are fast, reliable, and deterministic. They are also blind to anything that requires understanding what your code is supposed to do. Claude Code operates differently. It reads code the way a human security researcher would — tracing data flows across files, understanding business logic, and reasoning about what could go wrong given the specific context of your application.https://blog.devops-monk.com/2026/04/claude-code-hooks-subagents-piping/Sun, 26 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://blog.devops-monk.com/2026/04/claude-code-hooks-subagents-piping/Most teams use Claude Code reactively — they type a prompt, Claude responds, they type another. That is fine, but it leaves significant value on the table. Claude Code has four automation layers that let you turn it from a reactive assistant into an active workflow participant: Layer What it does When to reach for it Hooks Shell or HTTP calls that fire on lifecycle events “This must happen every time, without exception” Custom Commands Reusable slash commands for repeatable prompts “I type the same prompt repeatedly” Skills Context-aware instructions Claude loads automatically “Claude should always do X when working on Y” Subagents Separate Claude instances for isolated, parallel work “This task is noisy and the main session only needs a summary” This post covers how to create each one and when to use them.https://blog.devops-monk.com/2026/04/claude-computer-use-devops-workflows/Sun, 26 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://blog.devops-monk.com/2026/04/claude-computer-use-devops-workflows/Claude’s computer use capability — the ability to see your screen and interact with applications via mouse clicks, keyboard input, and scrolling — is one of the most discussed features in the AI space. It is also one of the most misapplied. The correct mental model is not “Claude can now automate everything on my screen.” It is “Claude now has a flexible fallback layer for tasks that do not have a structured API integration.https://blog.devops-monk.com/2026/04/mastering-claude-code-cli/Sun, 26 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://blog.devops-monk.com/2026/04/mastering-claude-code-cli/If you have been using Claude in a browser tab to help with code, you are leaving most of its capability on the table. Claude Code CLI brings the full power of Claude directly into your terminal — it reads your actual codebase, runs real commands, edits files, commits code, and integrates with every tool in your DevOps stack. This guide covers everything from installation to advanced patterns that most engineers never discover.https://blog.devops-monk.com/2026/04/mcp-servers-for-devops-teams/Sun, 26 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://blog.devops-monk.com/2026/04/mcp-servers-for-devops-teams/The MCP (Model Context Protocol) ecosystem now has over 14,000 servers. Most of them you do not need. Installing too many slows responses, inflates your context window with tool definitions that never get used, and turns debugging into a guessing game across a dozen integrations. This guide applies a simple filter: only install a server if it replaces a daily copy-paste workflow. It is organised by role — developers, QA testers, and DevOps/platform engineers — because the right stack is different for each.https://blog.devops-monk.com/2026/04/writing-claude-md-that-works/Sun, 26 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://blog.devops-monk.com/2026/04/writing-claude-md-that-works/Every CLAUDE.md file gets loaded into context on every session. Most teams treat it like documentation — a place to describe the project, list the tech stack, explain what the tests do. That is the wrong mental model and it is why most CLAUDE.md files are both too long and too ineffective. CLAUDE.md is behavioral programming. Its job is to change how Claude makes decisions, not to describe facts that Claude can read from the codebase itself.https://blog.devops-monk.com/2026/04/build-ai-assistant-without-framework/Sun, 26 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://blog.devops-monk.com/2026/04/build-ai-assistant-without-framework/There is a tendency in the AI tooling space to reach for frameworks — LangChain, AutoGen, CrewAI, OpenClaw — the moment you want an AI that does more than answer one question at a time. Most of the time, that is the wrong move. The framework adds complexity, dependencies, and debugging surface area for problems that a few shell scripts and cron jobs solve perfectly well. Claude Code’s headless mode (-p flag) plus a markdown file for personality plus cron scheduling is a complete AI assistant stack.https://blog.devops-monk.com/2026/04/build-your-own-ddns-platform/Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://blog.devops-monk.com/2026/04/build-your-own-ddns-platform/If you run a home server — a Raspberry Pi, a NAS, a Kubernetes cluster in your garage — you have probably hit the same annoying wall: your internet provider gives you a different public IP address every few days, and suddenly nobody can reach your server anymore. This post explains how I solved that problem by building ddns.devops-monk.com, a fully self-hosted Dynamic DNS platform. I will walk through the idea from scratch, explain every moving part in plain English, and include full architecture diagrams for those who want the deep technical picture.