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 …
There are well-known community module libraries for AWS: Cloud Posse, the terraform-aws-modules collection, plenty more. Both terraform-aws-bootstrap and terraform-aws-security-baseline use almost none of them. Every …
Bootstrapping the account got it ready: somewhere to store state, an identity to deploy as, enough for the next tofu apply to run. Ready is not the same as safe. An account with no audit trail, nothing watching it, and …
A long-lived AWS access key, sitting in a CI system, is just about the single credential I’d most like to be rid of. It’s powerful, it never expires unless someone remembers to rotate it (nobody remembers to rotate it), …
