We Ditched Terraform 1.10 for CloudFormation: Reducing IaC Complexity for Our Small AWS Team We’re a 4-person engineering team managing 32 AWS resources across dev, staging, and production environments for a B2B SaaS product. For 18 months, we relied on Terraform 1.10 to manage our infrastructure as code (IaC). But by Q3 2024, the overhead of maintaining Terraform outweighed its benefits for our
What if your Kubernetes cluster simply refused to run unsigned images? I spent some time experimenting with enforcing image provenance in a small Kubernetes setup using MicroK8s. The idea was simple: Only container images with valid cryptographic signatures are allowed to run in the cluster. For this I used: GitLab CI/CD (build + signing pipeline) Cosign / Sigstore (image signing) Kyverno (admissi
Most teams I have worked with have one auth test in their suite. It looks like this: test('valid token verifies', () => { const token = signSync({ sub: 'user-1', aud: 'api://backend' }, secret); const result = verify(token, options); expect(result.valid).toBe(true); }); That test is fine. It is also a smoke test, not a regression suite. It catches the case where verification is completely b
The on-call alert at 02:14 said auth_5xx_rate spiked from 0.01 to 31.4. Not a deploy window. Not a traffic spike. Just thirty-one percent of authenticated requests failing for ~four minutes, then back to baseline. The cause was a JWKS rotation on the issuer side. New keys came in. Old keys went out. Caches in our service didn't refresh fast enough. Tokens signed with the new key were rejected beca
Some time ago, I was building a chat application using AWS Websocket API gateway. Things were going smoothly. I created a WebSocket API Gateway, added $connect, $disconnect, and sendMessage/addGroup routes. From the frontend (React) side, everything was fire-and-forget. You send a message, and the onMessageHandler takes care of it 💪🏼 But then a new requirement of uploading files using S3 signed