DevOps Compass is a practical knowledge hub for engineers who need clear, real-world answers to DevOps problems.
Why it exists
There's no shortage of DevOps content on the internet. What's in short supply is content that's actually useful when something breaks at midnight, or when you're evaluating two tools and need a straight answer rather than a hedged comparison of every possible option.
Most DevOps guides fall into one of two traps: they're either so abstract that you can't apply them to a real problem, or they're so narrow that you get the answer to one specific command without understanding why it works. DevOps Compass tries to do neither.
Every article here is written around a real scenario — a pod that won't start, a pipeline that keeps failing, a node that just went NotReady. The goal is to give you a troubleshooting flow that works in production, not a tutorial written for an idealised environment that nobody actually runs.
Coverage
Six topic areas that together cover most of what a DevOps or platform engineering team deals with day to day.
Pod lifecycle failures, node issues, storage, networking, autoscaling, and cluster operations — from ImagePullBackOff to HPA not scaling.
EKS, IAM, ECR, VPC, load balancers, and security groups — the AWS layer that most Kubernetes problems eventually trace back to.
Pipeline debugging, GitLab CI, Jenkins, Docker build failures, environment variable issues, and deployment automation.
Docker runtime problems, image management, registry authentication, and container startup failures.
Observability stack decisions, Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, health probe configuration, and runbook structure.
Ingress configuration, DNS, service mesh, X-Forwarded-For, security groups, VPC architecture, and IAM access patterns.
How we write
These aren't aspirational guidelines — they're the filter every article goes through before it's published.
Where it comes from
The content on DevOps Compass isn't generated from documentation or assembled from forum posts. It comes from the work of actually running infrastructure: debugging clusters under load, tracking down why a pipeline keeps failing in CI but not locally, figuring out why a node went NotReady at 3am.
That operational background shapes everything here — which error messages to prioritise, which steps to run in which order, what actually causes false positives in troubleshooting flows, and when a simple answer genuinely is the right one.
The goal is that when you land on an article with a specific problem, the guide reflects the same kind of systematic thinking you'd apply yourself — just already written down so you don't have to rebuild it from scratch.
Behind the site
DevOps Compass is maintained by the team behind Arctica, a DevOps and DevSecOps service company that helps teams with infrastructure, automation, CI/CD, monitoring, and cloud operations. The practical focus of this site reflects the kind of work Arctica does day to day — solving real infrastructure problems for real teams.