Monthly work summary for 2025-07 focusing on reliability improvements in test infrastructure for Kubernetes operators, highlighting two CI stabilization efforts that reduced flaky failures and improved release confidence.

June 2025: Key focus on stabilizing HDFS test suite in stackabletech/druid-operator. Implemented a test stability fix by extending KUTTL timeouts for HdfsCluster assertions and introducing TestAssert and TestStep resources with a 600-second timeout in the HDFS install template. This resolved flakes due to slow cluster startup and improves CI reliability. The change is tracked in commit eb1eef42a2a04e4739dea923bcca43c8e19a9433.

February 2025: Across the stackabletech reservoir, delivered coordinated upgrades, stability fixes, and TLS/security hardening across multiple Kubernetes operators and demos. The focus was on keeping platform components current with security and performance improvements, while preserving deployment reliability and test coverage.

January 2025 performance summary: Delivered DNS/domain reliability improvements and cross-repo operator-rs upgrades that enhance deployment predictability and security. Key outcomes include precise FQDN handling for cluster domains with trailing-dot support and corresponding tests/docs, a compatibility-safe revert of the default cluster domain to cluster.local with an opt-in via environment variable, and a coordinated upgrade of operator-rs to 0.84.1 across core operators (airflow-, superset-, commons-, zookeeper-, and kafka-). Build/config hygiene improvements and changelog cleanup accompany these changes, improving reproducibility and release readiness.