· Palaniappan P · 11 min read
What DevOps Guides Don't Tell You About Production AWS
Most DevOps guides teach what AWS services are. Production teaches what happens when 200 engineers use them together. Here's the gap.
DevOps & CI/CD
- · Palaniappan P · 9 min read
The AWS CLI Bug That Broke /dev/null Across Your Entire System
A security hardening PR in the AWS CLI applied chmod 0600 to any output path — including /dev/null — silently breaking Lambda invocations, S3 streaming commands, and every other process on affected hosts overnight.
- · Palaniappan P · 11 min read
Two Free LocalStack Alternatives in 2026: MiniStack vs floci
LocalStack went paid. MiniStack and floci both stepped up as free, MIT-licensed AWS emulators. We reviewed both — their architecture, services, and performance — so you can pick the right one for your team.
· Palaniappan P · 18 min read10 AWS DevOps Practices We Actually Use in Production in 2026
Real AWS DevOps practices from production: GitOps on EKS, OpenTelemetry, supply chain security, chaos engineering with FIS, and AI-assisted DevOps with Amazon Q.
· Palaniappan P · 8 min readAWS Environment Parity: Why Dev/Staging/Prod Drift Costs More Than It Saves
When dev works but production fails, it's almost always an environment parity problem. This guide covers building consistent environments across dev, staging, and prod—and the cost of not doing it.
· Palaniappan P · 9 min readAWS Infrastructure Drift Detection: How to Find and Fix Config Drift Before It Breaks Production
Infrastructure drift—when your actual AWS resources differ from what your IaC declares—causes silent failures and makes disaster recovery impossible. Learn how to detect drift systematically and fix it before it breaks production.
· Palaniappan P · 10 min readHow to Build a Safe Terraform Apply Workflow on AWS: Approval Gates, Plan Review, and Rollback
One bad `terraform apply` can delete your database, destroy your application load balancer, or lock your team out of AWS. This guide covers the approval gates, plan review processes, and safety tools that prevent infrastructure disasters.
· Palaniappan P · 9 min readHow to Upgrade the AWS Terraform Provider Safely: Strategy, Testing, and Rollback
Most teams are 2-3 major AWS provider versions behind. Old providers miss new AWS features, have security risks, and diverge from current best practices. This guide covers how to audit, upgrade, test, and rollback safely.
· Palaniappan P · 11 min readTerraform State Management on AWS: Imports, State Moves, and Emergency Repairs
Terraform state is the source of truth for your infrastructure. When it breaks, your entire IaC strategy breaks with it. This guide covers state imports, moves, emergency repairs, and the backend best practices that prevent state disasters on AWS.
· Palaniappan P · 8 min readHow to Implement Blue/Green Deployments on ECS with CodeDeploy
Blue/green deployments eliminate downtime by running two identical production environments. Traffic switches from blue (old) to green (new) instantly. This guide covers CodeDeploy automation, health check validation, and rollback strategies for zero-downtime releases on AWS ECS.
· Palaniappan P · 14 min readHow to Build Cost-Aware CI/CD Pipelines on AWS
CI/CD infrastructure is invisible until your DevOps bill hits $15,000/month. Build minutes, artifact storage, and ephemeral environments accumulate costs that few teams track. Here is how to measure and control them.
· Palaniappan P · 15 min readHow to Debug Production Issues Across Distributed AWS Systems
A 500ms latency spike in a distributed system could be a slow RDS query, a Lambda cold start, a downstream API timeout, or a CloudWatch Logs ingestion delay. Finding the cause requires correlated logs, traces, and metrics — not grep.