Principles for Agentic Operations
A manifesto
Webframp
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The Promise None of Them Kept
Promise theory described agents that observe, reason, and commit. The IaC generation never delivered it and CFEngine came closest. LLMs supplied the missing reasoning layer, and swamp is built for the agent that has it.
The Migrating Bottleneck
Four fixes into a DynamoDB sync backend, the ceiling kept moving: from a hot GSI partition to lock contention to catalog metadata no datastore could outrun.
Extension Overlap Is a Health Signal
Two extensions covering the same domain means the ecosystem is growing. That's not a governance problem.
Six Million Events, Three Minutes of Trouble
A load test that briefly knocked out Swamp's telemetry pipeline, and what it took for that to read as curiosity instead of an attack.
Drift Detection. No New Calls Required.
Zero API calls. Still found the security group rule you added.
The Mirror You Trained
The LLM does not create the thinking gap. It makes the gap visible and consequential for the first time.
The Same Move
Declarations were scaffolding for blind agents. Ceremonies were scaffolding for blind organizations. The same move removes both.
The Inspector's Instinct
The governance you know is the governance you repeat.
Presence Is Not Evidence
Deming told us. We made the signature the proof and called it quality.
Skin in the Game
What a development system looks like when you build it to keep yourself honest
Inception: Learning Swamp Through Swamp
A sandbox that teaches swamp, managed by swamp
You Were Never Declaring State. You Were Observing By Hand.
What changes when your agent can observe reality instead of reading your notes about it
The Pipeline Is Dead, Long Live the Agent Mesh
Sequential pipelines assume humans waiting in sequence. Agents do not wait.
Swamp Datastores: One Workflow, Any Machine
Agent state that follows you, then your team
Swamp Beyond Infrastructure
The design space that opens when you stop thinking in domains
The Workflow Collision
Your team's workflow and your agent's lifecycle want different things
Building the Machine
Encoding judgment the agent lacks into AWS operations
The Architect's Instinct
Mechanical friction is dissolving, but do not mistake easy for simple
Growing with the SparkleFormation registry
Using SparkleFormation registries with arguments to build reusable, platform-aware CloudFormation init configurations.
SparkleFormation Bedtime Story
A beginner's whirlwind tour of SparkleFormation, stumbling through VPC creation, AMI hunting and CloudFormation stack updates.
OS Install using VirtualBox raw disk access
Installing OpenBSD to an SD card from a MacBook Air using VirtualBox raw disk access.
Email in emacs
Setting up Notmuch with offlineimap and msmtp for fast, searchable email in Emacs on OS X.
Fixing emacs bindings in iTerm2
How to fix Shift-Meta key combinations in Emacs running inside iTerm2 on OS X by mapping raw escape codes.
Update cookbook_versions with an awk one-liner
A quick awk one-liner to populate cookbook_versions in a Chef environment file.
Splitting up a cookbook repo
A script for splitting a monolithic Chef cookbooks repo into individual repos using git filter-branch and hub.
Code as the new Latin
Reflections on why coding literacy matters for everyone, inspired by David Mitchell's comparison of code to Latin.
This I want to remember
Notes on the Opscode community effort to split the monolithic cookbooks repo into individual cookbook repos.
Opscode Community Summit - Day Two
Day two of the Opscode Summit, featuring the big announcement of Hosted Chef moving from Ruby+NoSQL to Erlang+MySQL.
Opscode Community Summit - Day One
Highlights from day one of the Opscode Community Summit, an unconference celebrating the Chef community.
About
I’m Sean Escriva, a principal platform engineer and engineering leader working at the intersection of infrastructure, reliability, and system design. I’ve been doing this work for more than 25 years. I’ve worked with AWS, Kubernetes, Terraform, CI/CD systems, and large-scale operational environments. Over time, I’ve become less interested in clever technology and more interested in useful…