Everybody who has run anything on AWS carries the same low-grade dread: the bill you don’t see coming. A cron that spins up an instance and forgets to kill it, a misconfigured NAT gateway billing you by the gigabyte, a …
A while back I wrote about hardening the account that would hold the signing key, and one line in it has aged badly. “GuardDuty is already looking,” I wrote: the account watched from day one, threat detection on before …
Some bugs are interesting because they’re subtle. These two were interesting because they were the exact opposite… in each case the tool had a hard rule I simply didn’t know about, and its error message couldn’t be …
The genuinely dangerous moment in infrastructure-as-code isn’t the apply. It’s the gap between the plan a human read and approved, and the change that actually runs a moment later. If those two are different computations …
Once an infrastructure repo has a few concerns in it (account hardening, the security baseline, the signing stack still to come) there’s a steady pressure to split them into separate stacks with separate state, and …
Every infrastructure repo runs the same CI: lint the OpenTofu, scan it, validate it, plan, apply. The first repo, you write that .gitlab-ci.yml by hand. The second, you copy it. By the third, you’ve got three copies of …
Every CI gate job across the infrastructure repos reaches for the same pile of tools: OpenTofu, tflint, trivy, checkov, gitleaks, terraform-docs, the AWS CLI. Installing that pile per job is both slow and quietly …
The OIDC post explained the handshake that lets a GitLab pipeline deploy to AWS with no stored key. This is the story of the first time I got it wrong, and spent an afternoon fixing the wrong thing. The error was a flat …
Turning on GuardDuty and Security Hub gives you threat detection. It also gives you a firehose. And an alert system that dutifully forwards everything in that firehose isn’t monitoring, it’s a very efficient way of …
A botched version bump made me stop and actually look at where go-tool-base lived, and I didn’t much like what I saw. GitHub had spent months quietly falling over, and when Mitchell Hashimoto (GitHub user #1299, no less) …
