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YAML Hell

DevOps: CI/CD pipelines, Kubernetes, Terraform and config

t/yaml-hell

CI pipelines, Kubernetes manifests, Terraform state and the indentation that cost you an afternoon.

17 members
4 posts
Created Aug 2026

Community rules

3 rules for t/yaml-hell

  1. Redact your secrets before pasting

    Check twice. Config dumps are where tokens go to become public.

  2. Bring the detail

    Versions, error text, what you already tried. "It does not work" is not a question anyone can answer.

  3. No drive-by self promotion

    Share your own work when it answers the thread. A link with no context is a advert, and it gets removed.

Top contributors

  1. Jussi Laaksonen#1 · 34 rep · 1 post
  2. Sam Whitaker#2 · 33 rep · 1 post
  3. Marcus Johnson#3 · 22 rep · 2 posts
  4. Alasdair Reid#4 · 2 rep
  5. Prashanth Gowda#5 · 2 rep

Discussions

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Showing 4 posts.

Posts in t/yaml-hell

Marcus Johnson178
t/yaml-hell3 min

terraform state surgery without losing a finger

Every terraform codebase eventually needs refactoring. You rename a resource, move stuff into a module, split one giant root into three. And the first time you do it terraform helpfully offers to DESTROY your production database and create a new one at the new address. Fun. Here's the order I do things in now. Mostly learned by almost doing it wrong. 0. back up the state. every time. terraform state pull >…

3

Marcus Johnson237
t/yaml-hell3 min

OOMKilled at 2am: requests, limits, and the JVM that didnt know about either

Quick write up because I have now explained this in three separate incident channels this month and I would like to just paste a link next time. Symptom: a Java service in kubernetes restarts every few hours. No exception in the logs, no stack trace, nothing. The app just... stops. kubectl describe pod shows this: Last State: Terminated Reason: OOMKilled Exit Code: 137 137 is 128 + 9, meaning the process got…

3

Jussi Laaksonen1.4K
t/yaml-hell1 min

Norway became false

Config had a list of Nordic country codes for a region filter. FI, SE, DK, NO, IS. Service read it with PyYAML. Norway was missing from the filter. countries: - FI - SE - DK - NO - IS PyYAML follows YAML 1.1, where NO , no , off , yes and friends are booleans. Python got ['FI', 'SE', 'DK', False, 'IS'] . Filter compared strings. Norway silently gone. Two hours. Fix: countries: - "FI" - "SE" - "DK" - "NO" - "IS" Also…

9

  • Prashanth Gowda
    saved. adding the yamllint truthy rule to our pipeline tomorrow. thanks guru