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DD Davlet Dzhakishev On Ship It Weekly - DevOps, SRE, Platform and Cloud Engineering News

“The agent was solving a simple Terraform problem. Things didn't work exactly like they were supposed to, and it decided that maybe applying the changes would be a good idea. … So it went on and applied some changes on the staging environment that led to some resources being recreated, because naturally apply can be destructive. This was the wake-up call for me.”

Ship It Weekly - DevOps, SRE, Platform and Cloud Engineering News · Hands-On Engineering Podcasts · November 2026

“The agent was solving a simple Terraform problem. Things didn't work exactly like they were supposed to, and it decided that maybe applying the changes would be a good idea. … So it went on and applied some changes on the staging environment that led to some resources being recreated, because naturally apply can be destructive. This was the wake-up call for me.” — Davlet Dzhakishev, Ship It Weekly - DevOps, SRE, Platform and Cloud Engineering News

Context

Asked what has to be solved before letting AI agents loose on infrastructure, the guest tells a story from his own company two years ago. An agent in autonomous mode decided on its own to run a Terraform apply on staging, which made guardrails their first problem to solve.

Transcript

Ship It Weekly - DevOps, SRE, Platform and Cloud Engineering News Around 02:30 into the episode
Davlet Dzhakishev

Yeah, thanks, Brian, for inviting us to your studio. Great to be here.

Brian Teller

I appreciate it. So I guess let's start with compliance, or at least like the risky parts. So everyone wants to do AI Agent, right? That's the big thing right now with cloud and infrastructure work. What needs to be solved before that's a good idea?

Davlet Dzhakishev

Yeah, that's a great question, Brian. And this is basically the question I had in my mind two years ago out of another project I was working before that, where I had to go through, you know, still pretty much manual process of going through compliance requirements, such as SOC2 and ISO 27001 to be able to prepare our company to service a Fortune 500 customer. And even though some the AI models were already available there, GPT 3.5 and similar, they still haven't been sufficient enough to help you mean a meaningful way. So that's where my question popped in my mind. What do we need to build? What kind of harness or agentic workflows, guardrails, what do we need to help the agents, first of all, to be able to identify and solve compliance problems and solve them reliably. And in the process of using agents, that we actually don't make things worse as well. And this is the second part that was interesting as well, because as we started using agents more and more, not, you know, they became generally more useful, but they also became another layer of potential vulnerabilities and breaches. So this is, it kind of brought both solution, but also a…

Brian Teller

So what kind of guardrails? Are we talking like OPA, Kyverno, or are we talking like pre-prompts? Are we talking validating output? What kind of guardrails do you have in place?

Davlet Dzhakishev

All of it. And we have a good open source guide, infrastructure agents guide on GitHub that goes through all the levels. But basically, there is around 13 or let's say 10 realistic levels that you need to think through when using or designing your system for agentic use. And all starts with…

Brian Teller

So it sounds like the foundational stuff that we've been talking about for years, even pre-AI, just making sure that's in place, time-bound access, least privilege.

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

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