iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

This is the lightboard from my Datadog Illuminated episode with Julien Le Dem on OpenLineage. Before OpenLineage, broken data was nearly impossible to trace back to its source. Read the full board notes here: gist.github.com/wiggitywhitney/fc5b…

A chalkboard-style lightboard diagram titled "OpenLineage - A common observability framework for data pipelines." The left side lists problems: isolated teams, bad data propagates (errors, privacy), finding bad data sources is hard, no common language. The center shows a diagram of Org A, Org B, and Org C connected by data flow arrows feeding into a "Data Lineage Repo," along with definitions for Job, Run, and Datasets (input/output), and a note that facets are metadata specs specific to a technology. Below that, a box lists what OpenLineage unlocks: trying different tools easily, easier onboarding, root cause identification, data reliability, and impact analysis and compliance. The right side shows OpenLineage as a hub connecting lineage producers (Airflow, Spark, Snowflake) to lineage consumers (Marquez, DataHub, Datadog), with a circled note reading "OpenLineage at Datadog" listing data job monitoring, data quality monitoring, and lineage graph use cases.

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Whitney Lee @whitneylee.com · 29/09/2026

Datadog On Air: Datadog On Air Live From San Francisco Summit 2026

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Whitney Lee @whitneylee.com · 27/09/2026

“Managing Kubernetes RBAC manually is a path to burnout.” In this episode of 🌩️Thunder, Saim Safdar, CNCF Ambassador and host of the Cloud Native Podcast, explains how Paralus centralizes Kubernetes access management acr... whitneylee.com/2026/09/27/managing-…

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Whitney Lee @whitneylee.com · 27/09/2026

Software Defined Interviews: The KubeCon Drone Demo, CFP Reviewing at Scale, and the Agentic AI Foundation, with Lin Sun

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Whitney Lee @whitneylee.com · 26/09/2026

@julien.ledem.net, Principal Engineer at Datadog and project lead for OpenLineage, explains how one open standard replaces a tangle of one-off integrations for tracking data across every tool in a pipeline. Watch here: youtu.be/uIuBBp3Ib64

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Whitney Lee @whitneylee.com · 25/09/2026

InfoQ: AI Meets Internal Developer Platform (InfoQ coverage of KubeCon EU talk with Viktor Farcic)

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Whitney Lee @whitneylee.com · 24/09/2026

SPIFFE is the standard for verifying workload identity in production, and SPIRE is the reference implementation that puts it to work. Volkan Özçelik on how far it scales: "It can scale up to millions of nodes, and it still works." Watch the full 🌩️Thunder episode: youtu.be/cCHXRzoThsM

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Whitney Lee @whitneylee.com · 23/09/2026

With AI, how do we match the speed of trust with the speed of creation? I'm hosting a livestream today! We will be interviewing practitioners from companies like Frame.io, JLL, and Cognition to learn how they're trusting AI to do impactful work. Join here: www.youtube.com/live/pLO-YL2...

youtube.com

Datadog On Air Live From San Francisco Summit 2026

Join the livestream for Datadog On Air, a podcast showcasing engine...

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Whitney Lee @whitneylee.com · 23/09/2026

Datadog Illuminated: Evaluating an AI-Powered Process That Creates and Tunes Monitors, with Eric Karschner

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Whitney Lee @whitneylee.com · 22/09/2026

When a new workload spins up in Kubernetes, it has nothing to prove who it is yet, no credential, no secret. But it can get a verified identity in seconds - how? Watch the full 🌩️Thunder episode: youtu.be/cCHXRzoThsM #SPIFFE #SPIRE #WorkloadIdentity #CloudNative

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Whitney Lee @whitneylee.com · 21/09/2026

LLMday Austin: The Best Laid Spans: An AI Agent That Instruments Your Code with OpenTelemetry

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Whitney Lee @whitneylee.com · 20/09/2026

We secure data at rest. We secure data in transit. But what about data in use? In this episode of 🌩️Thunder, Tobin Feldman-Fitzthum explains how Confidential Containers uses hardware-level trusted execution environments to isolate you... whitneylee.com/2026/09/20/we-secure…

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Whitney Lee @whitneylee.com · 19/09/2026

Datadog Illuminated: Evaluating an Agent That Creates and Tunes Monitors, with Eric Karschner

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Whitney Lee @whitneylee.com · 18/09/2026

kagent is a framework to help you make AI agents and run them in Kubernetes declaratively, with YAML. Lin Sun, co-creator of kagent, joined to walk through how it works. Here's the lightboard we made together. Read the notes: gist.github.com/wiggitywhitney/97e3…

A hand-drawn lightboard diagram on a black background, filled with colorful marker text and boxes mapping out how kagent works. Sections include "Before kagent," "kagent config" with a Kubernetes CRD circle, "kagent controller watches," "Agent Sandbox," "Agent Runtimes," "Why run your agent on Kubernetes," "AUTH," and "How do people use kagent," connected by arrows and underlines in pink, yellow, and green.

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Whitney Lee @whitneylee.com · 17/09/2026

Lin Sun, Head of Open Source at Solo.io and kagent co-creator, explains how kagent turns AI agent workloads into Kubernetes resources you deploy declaratively, with kubectl apply, alongside everything else in your cluster. Watch the full 🌩️Thunder episode: youtu.be/z2Xpd-WwmLE

A Thunder-branded thumbnail. Whitney Lee, on the left in a red and black plaid shirt, laughs and gestures toward a black lightboard covered in colorful hand-drawn diagrams and notes about kagent. The word "Kagent" is written across the board in large yellow letters, with "Build and Run AI Agents on Kubernetes with" above it in white. Lin Sun, on the right, smiles at the camera, with "with Lin Sun" written beside her in yellow.

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Whitney Lee @whitneylee.com · 16/09/2026

Volkan Özçelik on workload identity: "I am not identifying hosts because I don't want to say this host can talk to this host. I want to say this application in this host can talk to or cannot talk to this application on the other host." Watch the full 🌩️Thunder episode: youtu.be/cCHXRzoThsM

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Whitney Lee @whitneylee.com · 15/09/2026

Keycloak's login flow can be enhanced using configurable steps beyond the basic username/password prompt. What are some examples of customized login steps? Watch the full 🌩️Thunder episode: youtu.be/Kvb4PMIgR_g #Keycloak #IAM #CloudNative

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Whitney Lee @whitneylee.com · 14/09/2026

Volkan Özçelik explains what workload authentication looked like before SPIFFE: "We were baking service tokens to the images, which is not the most secure way." Watch the full 🌩️Thunder episode: youtu.be/cCHXRzoThsM #SPIFFE #SPIRE #WorkloadIdentity #CloudNative

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Whitney Lee @whitneylee.com · 13/09/2026

Will AI help or hinder a developer’s experience with an internal platform? At KubeCon EU, the audience found out. My bestie Viktor Farcic (Upbound) and I ran an interactive session where attendees voted at key moments on which tools ou... whitneylee.com/2026/09/13/will-ai-h…

Title slide on an orange background. Large bold white text reads "Choose Your Own Adventure: AI Meets Internal Developer Platform." Below in white italic: "Whitney Lee, Datadog & Viktor Farcic, Upbound." The KubeCon and CloudNativeCon Europe 2026 logos appear in the upper left corner. A stylized windmill and Dutch tulips decorate the right side and bottom corners.

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Whitney Lee @whitneylee.com · 12/09/2026

John Willis, one of the founding figures of DevOps, joins Software Defined Interviews to explain why AI risk no longer has a go/no-go answer, only a question of how much you're willing to accept. Listen here! www.softwaredefinedinterviews.com/1… #DevOps #AI #Podcast

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Whitney Lee @whitneylee.com · 11/09/2026

Software Defined Interviews: DevOpsDays, Technical Storytelling, and Loading the Dishwasher, with Jason Yee

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Whitney Lee @whitneylee.com · 10/09/2026

When Keycloak finishes logging a user in, the application gets back three different tokens, not just one. What is each token for, and why do you need all three? Watch the full 🌩️Thunder episode: youtu.be/Kvb4PMIgR_g #Keycloak #IAM #CloudNative

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Whitney Lee @whitneylee.com · 09/09/2026

Datadog Illuminated: Building an Eval Platform for an Investigation Agent, with Benjamin Barton

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Whitney Lee @whitneylee.com · 08/09/2026

In this Datadog Illuminated episode, Scott Yak & I discuss how evals for the Datadog MCP server run against live data that goes stale FAST How did Scott & team solve this? See the lightboard below & read the board notes here: gist.github.com/wiggitywhitney/be19…

Handwritten green, yellow, and white notes on a black lightboard titled "Evaluating the Datadog MCP Server." Left column shows "Why eval MCP server?" with a diagram of a query flowing from a person through an Agent (LLM), Datadog MCP, and Datadog Backend and back. Below it, "How eval MCP server?" defines eval = Agent harness + MCP server + Q&A pair, with Actual ≈ expected response (if passing). Middle column shows "Automate eval generation," a flow starting with a seed query fanning out into "FUZZING" to make many question variants, with a note that one seed produces many Q/A pairs and evals get re-run to update answers. Right side lists "Benefits of Great Evals" in four numbered sections: Speed (fast to generate, fast to run, see impact quickly), Visibility Into Progress (high quantity of evals, tagging, traces), Mutual Benefit (Datadog AI agents like Bits AI SRE and Bits AI Assistant use the Datadog MCP, so a better MCP server means better agents), and Devs Like Writing Evals (fast feedback, showing impact, preventing regression).

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Whitney Lee @whitneylee.com · 07/09/2026

AI Engineer World’s Fair: Build a Platform, Unleash an Agent on it…. and Watch it Burn!

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Whitney Lee @whitneylee.com · 06/09/2026

At Cloud Native AI Day (KubeCon EU), Thomas Vitale (Systematic) and I co-presented a live demo where audience votes drove real-time canary rollouts for GenAI apps using OpenTelemetry and Flagger. Watch the recording here: youtu.be/CRcYbl-g3…

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Whitney Lee @whitneylee.com · 05/09/2026

Scott Yak explains how his team evaluates the Datadog MCP server against a bajillion scenarios and data that goes stale before they can finish testing it, using a method that's a little bit spicy. ♫ Give it a watch! youtu.be/HZ4n1h8j8MY #Datadog #MCP #AIAgents #Evals #DatadogIlluminated

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Whitney Lee @whitneylee.com · 04/09/2026

It's easy to assume identity and access management is just authentication and authorization. But an IAM system like Keycloak handles a lot more. Like what? Watch the full 🌩️Thunder episode: youtu.be/Kvb4PMIgR_g #Keycloak #IAM #CloudNative

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Whitney Lee @whitneylee.com · 03/09/2026

AI Engineer World’s Fair: Build a Platform, Unleash an Agent on it…. and Watch it Burn!

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Whitney Lee @whitneylee.com · 02/09/2026

Did you know? There's a mechanism through which you can simulate users (100,000+!) to find out where Keycloak breaks before real users do. Watch the full 🌩️Thunder episode: youtu.be/Kvb4PMIgR_g #Keycloak #IAM #CloudNative

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Reposted by Whitney Lee

Coté @cote.io · 21/08/2026

"I wouldn't have even attempted it, 'cause it was like 60 or 100 hours. Like, where am I gonna get that from?" So, like me, he had Claude vibe-rpg him up a game. Hear more in @whitneylee.com and my interview with @peopleforrester.bsky.social www.softwaredefinedinterviews.com/125

softwaredefinedinterviews.com

Running D&D with AI, Determinism First, and Workflow ROI, with Michael Rishi Forrester

Michael Rishi Forrester built his son a homebrew tabletop campaign with AI in the loop - 20 hours of work instead of 60 to 100 - and found out the hard way that the model had quietly started doing the...

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Whitney Lee @whitneylee.com · 01/09/2026

Software Defined Interviews: Running D&D with AI, Determinism First, and Workflow ROI, with Michael Rishi Forrester

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Whitney Lee @whitneylee.com · 29/08/2026

SREday Austin: Livin' In the Future: Your Platform’s Next Interface Is an AI Agent

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Whitney Lee @whitneylee.com · 28/08/2026

This is the finished lightboard from my 🌩️Thunder conversation with Volkan Özçelik about SPIFFE and SPIRE. Bottom line: SPIFFE is a secure and automated way to manage identity, no secrets managers needed. How does it work? gist.github.com/wiggitywhitney/56f8…

A black lightboard covered in colorful handwritten notes organized into four columns. The leftmost column, headed "Before SPIFFE...", lists problems with service tokens and mTLS certificates and defines SPIFFE and SPIRE. The second column, headed "WHO + WHAT = POLICY," includes a small diagram of pods stacked above a host layer and a machine layer, illustrating where identity is best assigned. The third column, headed "SPIFFE is designed to solve these problems," lists SPIFFE IDs, SVIDs, and how the Workload API attests and issues identity to workloads. The rightmost column covers what happens once attestation completes, a boxed list of "Benefits of SPIFFE," and boxed definitions of SPIRE Server and SPIRE Agent.

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Whitney Lee @whitneylee.com · 27/08/2026

Software Defined Interviews: The Chief Therapy Officer, Job Titles as Culture Change, and AI as Spreadsheets, with Bryan Ross

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Whitney Lee @whitneylee.com · 26/08/2026

“We go through our Kubernetes clusters and we’re killing nodes every 2 minutes in production constantly.” At Google Cloud Next, I hosted a fireside chat with David Faircloth (VP of Architecture and Engineering at Wendy’s) about ... whitneylee.com/2026/08/26/we-go-thr…

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Whitney Lee @whitneylee.com · 25/08/2026

“I just Googled Kubernetes and I know more than you do.” An investor actually said that to Emily Long’s all-woman founding team during a pitch! In this episode of Software Defined Interviews, Emily Long, CEO and co-founder of ... whitneylee.com/2026/08/25/i-just-go…

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Whitney Lee @whitneylee.com · 24/08/2026

At Observability Day, KubeCon EU, I presented Spinybacked Orbweaver, an AI agent that automatically instruments your JavaScript code with OpenTelemetry using OTel Weaver as the standards contract. Watch the recording here: youtu.be/JgzqzAYL0…

Title slide with a dark crimson background. Large white bold text reads "When the Codebase Starts Instrumenting Itself." Below in white italic text: "Whitney Lee, Datadog." In the upper right corner, a rectangular badge reads "Observability Day EUROPE."

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Whitney Lee @whitneylee.com · 23/08/2026

“I’ve done migrations similar to this before we had these kind of tools and it was a very different world.” In this episode of Datadog Illuminated, Nick Isaacs, engineer on Datadog’s AI DevX team, walks through the LLM-powered... whitneylee.com/2026/08/23/ive-done-…

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Whitney Lee @whitneylee.com · 22/08/2026

“When I talk to people from projects who are really struggling with this, it’s because they never had systems to deal with low-quality contributions to begin with.” In this episode of Software Defined Interviews, Josh Berkus, Kubernete... whitneylee.com/2026/08/22/when-i-ta…

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Whitney Lee @whitneylee.com · 21/08/2026

Humans have had identity solutions for years. For example, passwords, two-factor auth, and SSO. But what about services? They need identity too, especially now, with AI agents in the mix. In this 🌩️Thunder episode, Henry A... whitneylee.com/2026/08/21/humans-ha…

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Whitney Lee @whitneylee.com · 20/08/2026

“Making the wrong thing is very expensive.” In this episode of Software Defined Interviews, Heidi Waterhouse, co-author of Progressive Delivery, explains why the DevOps loop is missing a critical piece: user feedback. Software sho... whitneylee.com/2026/08/20/making-th…

YouTube thumbnail for SDI episode 120. Heidi Waterhouse appears as a guest alongside the Software Defined Interviews branding. The episode title "Progressive Delivery, with Heidi Waterhouse" is displayed prominently.

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Whitney Lee @whitneylee.com · 19/08/2026

@volkan.io, Principal Kubernetes Software Engineer at Broadcom, joins me on 🌩️Thunder to explain how SPIFFE gives every Kubernetes workload a verifiable identity without relying on a pre-shared secret. Watch here: youtu.be/cCHXRzoThsM #SPIFFE #SPIRE #WorkloadIdentity #CloudNative

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Whitney Lee @whitneylee.com · 18/08/2026

Kubescape doesn't just find security problems in a Kubernetes cluster. It also watches how workloads behave at runtime and turns that into hardening policy proposals. But how? Watch the full 🌩️Thunder episode: youtu.be/z008cHQDA2Q #Kubescape #KubernetesSecurity #eBPF #CloudNative

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Whitney Lee @whitneylee.com · 17/08/2026

When should you reach for Kubescape as a CLI, and when should you install it as an Operator running inside your cluster? Watch the full 🌩️Thunder episode: youtu.be/z008cHQDA2Q #Kubescape #Kubernetes #CloudNative #DevSecOps

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Whitney Lee @whitneylee.com · 16/08/2026

“In Kubernetes, ‘pod’ refers to both a configuration stored in etcd AND the actual running container.” In this episode of 🌩️Thunder, Abby Bangser (Principal Engineer at Syntasso) and I untangle CRDs, custom resources, controllers... whitneylee.com/2026/08/16/in-kubern…

Whitney Lee and Abby Bangser standing at a lightboard covered with colorful handwritten text about Kubernetes custom resources, CRDs, controllers, operators, and admission controllers. The 🌩️Thunder show branding is visible.

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Whitney Lee @whitneylee.com · 15/08/2026

Kubescape's vulnerability scanner builds on Grype, then filters out any vulnerabilities in software packages that aren't actually loaded into memory by the container. How much does that cut down a typical vulnerability report? Watch the full 🌩️Thunder episode: youtu.be/z008cHQDA2Q

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Whitney Lee @whitneylee.com · 14/08/2026

In 2021, the National Security Agency (NSA) published a hardening guide for securing Kubernetes clusters. This guide inspired a CNCF security project. Can you guess which one? Watch the full 🌩️Thunder episode: youtu.be/z008cHQDA2Q #Kubescape #Kubernetes #NSA #CNCF #CloudNative

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Whitney Lee @whitneylee.com · 13/08/2026

This is the finished lightboard from the 🌩️Thunder episode on Keycloak. Ever wonder why it's so easy to plug an app into Keycloak? This board explains the OpenID Connect flow, step by step. Read the full board notes here: gist.github.com/wiggitywhitney/2796…

A lightboard covered in handwritten neon notes about Keycloak. Sections include "Before Keycloak," "Identity & Access Management (IAM)," "Log-in Flow," "Installing Keycloak," "Administrator Experience," and "Open ID Connect Flow," the last with a numbered sequence diagram showing arrows between a stick figure labeled User, an Application box, and Keycloak. A boxed callout in the lower left reads "Keycloak is the open source Identity + access management solution."

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Whitney Lee @whitneylee.com · 12/08/2026

@ahus1.de, Keycloak maintainer at IBM, joins me on 🌩️Thunder to explain how Keycloak puts you in full control of identity and access management, with no vendor lock-in. Watch here: youtu.be/Kvb4PMIgR_g #Keycloak #IAM #CloudNative

Thumbnail for the 🌩️Thunder episode "What Is Keycloak? Open Source Identity and Access Management." Whitney Lee, laughing and pointing at her cheek, appears on the left in front of a lightboard covered in handwritten notes about identity management, two-factor authentication, and a numbered Keycloak login flow diagram. Alexander Schwartz appears on the right in a dark blazer, wearing glasses, with his name in large white letters below him next to the word "With."

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