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Hey, I'm Brian. This is Ship It Weekly by Tellers
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Tech. If you're new here, I've worn the DevOps,
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SRE, and platform engineering hats over the years,
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and I do some coaching on the side. This show
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is me skimming the noise and pulling out what
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actually matters when you're the one running
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infra and owning reliability. All right. This
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week's theme is pretty obvious. Your CI is a
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dependency. Vendor pricing models are shifting
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under your feet and AI is getting shoved into
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pipelines in ways that create entirely new failure
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modes. Let's start with GitHub. So GitHub announced
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a pricing change for actions that would have
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added a cloud platform charge to self -hosted
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runners in private and internal repos. Not compute,
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you still pay for your own compute. This was
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basically GitHub charging for the orchestration
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layer and the control plane side of actions.
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People freaked out loud and fast. And GitHub
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came out and said they're postponing that billing
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change while they reevaluate. So the story isn't
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they're charging now, the story is they tried
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to charge, got major pushback and hit pause.
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Important detail though, they're still moving
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forward with reducing hosted runner prices in
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2026. So GitHub is still actively tuning the
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economics of actions. They're just not ready
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to light up the self -hosted runner fee just
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yet. Then because timing is hilarious, GitHub
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hosted action runners had an incident yesterday.
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I'm not even bringing that up to dunk on them.
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It just reinforces the point. Actions is not
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just CI. GitHub is part of your delivery control
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plane. When it's down or degraded, a lot of companies
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basically lose their ability to ship, deploy,
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or recover cleanly. So here's the platform lesson.
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Even if the fee is postponed, this is your warning
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shot. GitHub wants to monetize actions like a
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platform product. not a free feature. If you
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own CI CD, now is the time to get your house
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in order. Start measuring actions minutes by
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repo and by workflow, especially the expensive
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ones. The long integration suites, the run everything
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on every PR pipelines, the stuff that's there
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because it's always been there. Then go hunt
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down dumb minutes, not even because you're scared
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of pricing, but because it's usually a straight
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win anyway. faster PR feedback, fewer queues,
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less flakiness, lower compute costs, and less
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why did this run 12 times noise. Also, write
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down your GitHub is sad plan, like literally.
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If GitHub Actions is down, what can still happen?
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Can you still deploy a hotfix? Can you still
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promote an image? Can you still roll back? Or
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is your plan basically, we wait and refresh the
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status page? Even a tiny break glass path is
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better than chaos. All right, let's go from GitHub
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pricing whiplash to HashiCorp pricing whiplash.
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So HashiCorp is finishing the transition off
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of the old legacy free plan for HCP Terraform.
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The legacy free plan hits end of life on March
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31st, 2026, and orgs get moved to the newer free
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tier. That newer free tier includes unlimited
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users, but it caps at 500 managed resources.
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And that managed resources limit is why this
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is suddenly a big deal for real teams. Because
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500 resources sounds like a lot if you're thinking
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workspaces, but it's not workspaces. It's actual
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managed infrastructure objects. If you've got
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a couple of EKS clusters, they're node groups,
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IAM roles, policies, security groups, route tables,
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DNS. plus supporting stuff plus a few environments,
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you can hit 500 way faster than you think. So
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the takeaway here is not HashiCorp is bad or
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everyone panic, it's you need to know your numbers.
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If you're using Terraform Cloud or HCP Terraform,
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go find out. Are you still on legacy -free? How
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many managed resources you actually have today?
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And how fast that number is growing? Then decide
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what your reality -based options are. Maybe you're
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fine and this doesn't matter. Maybe you need
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to clean up old stacks and dead environments
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so you stop paying for zombie infra and zombie
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state. Maybe you need a paid tier because you're
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not a hobby shop. Or maybe you do want to move
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away. But do that as a controlled migration,
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not a March 2026 emergency where your pipeline
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turns into a pumpkin. This is the part I keep
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coming back to. Platform work is interestingly
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vendor economics work, not just Kubernetes and
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Terraform syntax. You need a basic plan for what
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if the rules change. All right, now we're going
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to take the your pipeline is a dependency theme
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and add AI to it. which is where things get extra
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weird. There's a write -up from Akito about what
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they're calling prompt pwned. This is basically
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the prompt injection meets CI CD story. Here's
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the pattern. Teams are wiring AI agents into
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GitHub actions or similar pipelines. The agent
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reads issues, PR descriptions, commit messages,
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logs, test output, and then makes decisions.
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Maybe it opens a PR. Maybe it posts a comment.
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Maybe it runs scripts. Maybe it has tools. The
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problem is, a lot of that input is untrusted.
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PR text is untrusted. Issue bodies are untrusted.
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commit messages can be untrusted. So if that
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untrusted content goes into the model prompt
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without guardrails, an attacker can basically
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smuggle instructions into the agent. And if the
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agent has the ability to run commands or use
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privileged tokens, you've created a new kind
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of supply chain exploit. It's not run untrusted
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code. It's run untrusted text through a system
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that has hands. So what do we do about it as
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platform folks? Treat AI agent inputs like you
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treat user input in an app. Sanitize, filter,
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don't just shove raw PR bodies into prompts.
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Keep the agent's permissions brutally minimal.
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If it doesn't need write, don't give it write.
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If it doesn't need cloud creds, don't give it
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cloud creds. If it's running in CI, don't give
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it a token that can do anything interesting.
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And if the agent generates commands, don't auto
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execute them like, well, the robot said so. This
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whole space is new enough that a lot of people
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are still in the, this is fun phase. We're already
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entering the, this is now a security boundary
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phase. All right. One more main story, and this
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one is classic security hygiene. There was a
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report that Home Depot had an exposure that allegedly
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granted access to internal systems for about
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a year. Not trying to pile on them, big companies
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have weird internal sprawl and stuff slips. But
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the reason I think it's worth mentioning on this
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show is because this is the exact kind of incident
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that happens in a lot of orgs, just smaller and
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quieter. Usually it's some variant of, a token
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was exposed somewhere it shouldn't be. The token
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had way more access than it needed. Nobody noticed
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for way too long. Detection and response was
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slower than it should have been. And even if
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you rotate creds, the bigger question is, how
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did it get there? And why did it have that much
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power? So what can you actually take back to
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your team from this? Secrets should expire. If
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you can't expire them, they should at least be
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rotated on a schedule that doesn't require drama.
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If it's a long -lived credential that can't be
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rotated, that's a smell. Assume exposure will
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happen. design the blast radius like it will.
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If a token leaks, what can it do? One service,
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one environment, or is it basically welcome to
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the kingdom? And lastly, detection. How quickly
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would you notice a token is being used from a
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weird place? Do you even log that in a way you
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can query? Do you have alerts? Does anyone own
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those alerts? A lot of orgs treat secret scanning
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as nice to have. It's not. It's one of the simplest
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ways to prevent a year long, how is this still
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alive story. All right. Let's do a quick lightning
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round. CDK for Terraform. CDK TF is officially
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sunset and the repo is archived. If you're using
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it, you're now in fork or migrate territory.
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The official guidance is basically synthesized
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to HCL and move on. Bitbucket is doing cleanup
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of free, unused workspaces. If you have dead
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orgs or old workspaces that nobody touches, you
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don't want to wake up to surprise deactivations
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or deletions. Inventory your SaaS, it's boring,
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but it's real. And SourceHUD is proposing pricing
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changes. I like mentioning this stuff because
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it's a reminder that even the indie dev tolling
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world is under cost pressure. Different scale
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than GitHub, same underlying reality. Infra costs
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money, and pricing models eventually shift. All
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right, quick human moment before we wrap. This
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week is a good example of something nobody is
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really talking about. Platform whiplash. Like
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GitHub floats a pricing change, everyone scrambles,
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then it gets postponed. HashiCorp shifts plan
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definitions and suddenly you're doing math on
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managed resources. Meanwhile, teams are wiring
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AI into CI pipelines, and now you're responsible
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for weird new security boundaries you didn't
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ask for. None of this is hard tech in a fun way.
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It's mental load. It's context switching. It's
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the quiet stress of realizing your job isn't
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just keeping systems up. It's also keeping your
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org from getting surprised by vendor changes.
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So if you're the person who owns CI, IAC, or
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platform reliability, here's a thing I've started
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doing that helps. Make a tiny platform watch
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list. Not a big roadmap doc, just a running note
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with three columns. What changed, what it breaks,
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and what we're doing about it. And the bar for
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what we're doing about it can be small. Sometimes
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it's literally measure action minutes or check
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our Terraform managed resource count or write
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down break glass deploy path. Because what burns
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people isn't one big outage. It's a constant
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drip of little, oh by the way, changes that all
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become your problem. So yeah, if this week felt
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like chaos, it's not just you. Put it in a lightweight
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system so your brain doesn't have to hold it
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all. All right. So the vibe this week is GitHub
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and HashiCorp are both messing with the economics
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of the platforms a lot of us depend on. AI agents
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are being wired into pipelines in ways that create
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brand new attack paths. And security stories
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like the Home Depot one keep reminding us that
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the boring basics are still the basics for a
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reason. If you got value out of this episode,
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please subscribe wherever you are listening.
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Seriously, it helps. And if you know the one
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person on your team who always ends up being
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the prod is weird detective, send it to them.
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I'm Brian. This is Ship It Weekly by Tellers
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Tech. Thanks for hanging out and I'll see you
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next week.
