Devops on Rafael Zago

How I use AI in development (Cursor and Claude)

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0300

The question I hear most about day-to-day AI is not “which model do you use?” It is “how do you organize this so it does not turn into a mess?”

I use AI constantly, in code and on this blog. What changed my routine was not a miracle prompt. It was treating the agent like someone who joins the project with no context: if the rule is not in a file, it does not exist. Skills, AGENTS.md, agents with narrow roles, and me reviewing the result. No magic.

Claude Code: from PRD to pull request with agents

Fri, 08 May 2026 00:00:00 -0300

Introduction

I discovered Claude Code a few months ago when our team was struggling to keep code reviews consistent. After six weeks with the tool, we cut average PR time from 4 days to 1 day — and that was only the start.

Claude Code automates a large part of the development workflow. PRDs, TDD, code review, even MCP setup. It is not magic, but it works well enough to change the day-to-day.

OpenShift Service Mesh 3: what changes with Istio

Mon, 07 Jul 2025 00:00:00 -0300

Overview

OpenShift Service Mesh 3 (OSSM3) replaces Maistra with upstream Istio as the core of the solution. Maistra was a Red Hat-maintained custom fork of Istio; with OSSM3, the base is Istio straight from the community project — no custom patches, no rebase.

Concrete changes include: control plane upgrades can be in-place or revision-based (canary), Kiali must be installed separately via the Kiali Operator, and multi-cluster support uses the standard upstream Istio topologies.

Jenkins CasC: high-performance pipelines with GitOps

Fri, 13 Jun 2025 00:00:00 -0300

The Need to Evolve: Challenges of “Basic” Jenkins

Jenkins is one of the most powerful and popular automation servers in the world. It drives countless CI/CD pipelines that build, test, and deploy applications. Managed only through the web UI — what many call “ClickOps” — it shows its weak spots.

ClickOps creates problems that hurt agility and reliability on any project, especially in complex MLOps environments:

No versioning or audit trail: Who changed a job config? Why? Without version control those questions are almost impossible to answer. Rolling back a bad change becomes a manual treasure hunt.
Inconsistency and hard reproducibility: Cloning a Jenkins environment for development, staging, or disaster recovery is painful and error-prone. Small config drifts between environments cause unexpected failures.
Painful scale and maintenance: Managing dozens or hundreds of jobs by hand does not scale. Maintenance becomes a bottleneck, and consistency across projects stays out of reach.

To get the reliability, speed, scale, and security modern projects need, you have to go beyond the basics.

Who am I? About Rafael Zago

Mon, 04 Dec 2023 00:00:00 -0300

Introduction

Qué pasa?

Hi. Don’t take me too seriously, okay? I built this space to share a bit of what I know—and about 90% of it came from the internet. So it was past time to give some of it back.

Today I’m a senior software automation engineer at Red Hat. Before that I bounced through a few companies, small and large, doing a bit of everything:

DevOps at heart, sysadmin by vocation.
Building learning methods and structuring training.
Years of application support across all sizes and complexity levels.
Instructor at Caelum/Alura.
Godfather to the coolest kid on the planet. No bias here…

Communities

I’m a DevOps person at heart and also part of the DevOpsDays SP organizing team.

CI/CD upstream vs downstream: when to use each

Fri, 02 Jun 2023 00:00:00 -0300

Integrating Skupper upstream and downstream

Integrating upstream and downstream projects is rarely simple. Here is a practical approach for Skupper on the upstream side and its commercial downstream line, using familiar tools for each side of the work.

Introduction

Skupper is an open-source project that provides a service network for Kubernetes. It is developed by Red Hat and released under the Apache 2.0 license. That is the upstream version—the one under active development.

Skupper: multicloud app network in a few commands

Sat, 01 Oct 2022 00:00:00 -0300

References and technologies used

Tools

A computer with minikube [2] installed;
A terminal to run the commands;
kubectl > 1.15 [6] or newer.

Solution overview

Skupper [1] lets you connect two or more cloud environments in a non-intrusive, secure way. Those environments can sit on different cloud providers—AWS, GCP, Azure, and others—or on native Kubernetes clusters.