Cloud Native & Open Source: A Team Lead’s Working Journal 💻

In today’s fast-paced tech landscape, it’s common to find incredibly talented engineers mastering complex orchestrators like Kubernetes or crafting intricate Infrastructure as Code solutions. We’re living in an era of high-level abstractions, which is fantastic for productivity. However, this focus on the ’new and shiny’ can sometimes lead us to overlook the foundational bedrock upon which everything is built. It might seem a bit old-school to write a blog post about hardening SSH in 2025. Yet, these ‘basic’ skills are more critical than ever. In a world of ephemeral infrastructure and complex supply chains, securing the front door to our systems remains a non-negotiable first step. ...

In my last few years as a Team Leader DevSecOps, I’ve spent a significant amount of time helping customers, mostly in the financial sector, navigate the complexities of cloud-native security. I have seen companies invest heavily in state-of-the-art runtime protection, CNAPPs, and sophisticated CI/CD security gates. Yet, a familiar pattern emerges time and again: the moment security teams start looking at vulnerability reports, chaos ensues. The numbers are just too high to handle, creating a paralyzing sense of alert fatigue. ...

Even in the cloud-native era, where everything is an API call away, some technologies from the past refuse to fade away. Recently, I found myself helping my team of talented engineers configure HashiCorp Boundary for Microsoft Active Directory authentication. I was surprised to see that they were not familiar with the concepts of LDAP, a technology that was a cornerstone of my career for years. After spending countless hours configuring Domino, Sametime, WebSphere Portal, and Connections with LDAP, the process felt like riding a bike. ...

In the rapidly evolving landscape of AI and large language models (LLMs), the ability to connect these models to external tools and data sources is crucial for building powerful, automated applications. The Model Context Protocol (MCP) has emerged as a standard for this purpose, but its use also introduces new security challenges. This article explores how to work securely with third-party MCP servers, drawing insights from the recently released OWASP GenAI security cheatsheet. ...

AI is part of our daily life, and I’m not afraid to say that I’m using it regularly for personal tasks. Naturally, I keep and respect the confidentiality of data, and I use my knowledge to understand what AI is telling me back; AI without being driven the correct way can produce absolute garbage. Now I’m transitioning from chatbot to AI CLI usage. I’m a victim of Network Chuck’s enthusiasm, so I wanted to build my first AI agent for publishing content on my personal blog. See below how I did it in minutes. ...

On November 5th, 2025, a set of high-severity vulnerabilities in runc were publicly disclosed, allowing for full container breakouts. Runc is the cornerstone of containerization on Linux, serving as the default low-level container runtime for industry-standard tools like Docker, Podman, and Kubernetes. Its ubiquity means that a vulnerability in runc has far-reaching implications for the entire cloud-native ecosystem. This post summarizes the vulnerabilities, the affected versions, and the recommended actions to mitigate them. ...

Introduction As everyone, we are evolving and we are including AI into several workflows, so it’s essential having a way to pass data to the AI from various types of files. This is where Microsoft’s MarkItDown comes in as a powerful tool. It’s a lightweight Python utility that converts numerous file formats into Markdown, a format easily consumable by AI models. Whether you want to use it with an AI assistant like Claude through its MCP server, as a CLI tool, with Python code, or run it in a container, MarkItDown offers a lot of flexibility. ...

As Halloween approaches and the days grow shorter, it’s the perfect time for a spooky story… or, in my case, a recap of what’s been brewing in my professional life! With the end of the year lurking around the corner, it’s time to take stock of the exciting changes, challenging projects, and community efforts that have made 2025 a year to remember. So, grab your pumpkin-spiced latte, and let’s dive into the cauldron of the last few months. ...

OpenSSF, the Open Source Security Foundation, is an influential collaborative initiative under the Linux Foundation dedicated to improving open source software security. Bringing together industry leaders, security experts, and developers, OpenSSF drives broad community efforts to address vulnerabilities, foster best practices, and enhance transparency across software supply chains. Among its standout contributions is the advocacy and tooling development around Software Bill of Materials (SBOMs), which have rapidly become indispensable for managing security risks in modern software ecosystems. ...

Quick but exciting personal update: I am now part of the organizing team for the Cloud Native Days event in Italy! Everyone who knows me understands how much I love the community side of my work and how passionate I am about joining events and organizing amazing experiences. Having worked on event organization before with my friends at Let’s Connect, I know it’s both challenging and incredibly rewarding. ...