This week on Ship It Weekly, Brian looks at three different versions of the same problem: systems are getting faster, but human attention is still the bottleneck.

We start with curl shutting down their bug bounty program after getting flooded with low-quality “AI slop” reports. It’s not a “security vs maintainers” story, it’s an incentives and signal-to-noise story. When the cost to generate reports goes to zero, you basically DoS the people doing triage.

Next, AWS improved RDS Blue/Green Deployments to cut writer switchover downtime to typically ~5 seconds or less (single-region). That’s a big deal, but “fast switchover” doesn’t automatically mean “safe upgrade.” Your connection pooling, retries, and app behavior still decide whether it’s a blip or a cascade.

Third, Amazon ECR added cross-repository layer sharing. Sounds small, but if you’ve got a lot of repos and you’re constantly rebuilding/pushing the same base layers, this can reduce storage duplication and speed up pushes in real fleets.

Lightning round covers a practical Kubernetes clientcmd write-up, a solid “robust Helm charts” post, a traceroute-on-steroids style tool, and Docker Kanvas as another signal that vendors are trying to make “local-to-cloud” workflows feel less painful.

We wrap with Honeycomb’s interim report on their extended EU outage, and the part that always hits hardest in long incidents: managing engineer energy and coordination over multiple days is a first-class reliability concern.

Links from this episode

curl bug bounties shutdown https://github.com/curl/curl/pull/20312

RDS Blue/Green faster switchover https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2026/01/amazon-rds-blue-green-deployments-reduces-downtime/

ECR cross-repo layer sharing https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2026/01/amazon-ecr-cross-repository-layer-sharing/

Kubernetes clientcmd apiserver access https://kubernetes.io/blog/2026/01/19/clientcmd-apiserver-access/

Building robust Helm charts https://www.willmunn.xyz/devops/helm/kubernetes/2026/01/17/building-robust-helm-charts.html

ttl tool https://github.com/lance0/ttl

Docker Kanvas (InfoQ) https://www.infoq.com/news/2026/01/docker-kanvas-cloud-deployment/

Honeycomb EU interim report https://status.honeycomb.io/incidents/pjzh0mtqw3vt

SRE Weekly issue #504 https://sreweekly.com/sre-weekly-issue-504/

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