DevOps & CI/CD

LocalStack paid tiers pushed free emulators forward. July 2026: MiniStack (~60+ services, real Postgres/Redis) vs floci (ms startup) — pick by CI speed vs DB fidelity.

Real AWS DevOps practices from production: GitOps on EKS, OpenTelemetry, supply chain security, chaos engineering with FIS, and AI-assisted DevOps with Amazon Q.

When staging is green and prod fails, it's usually config drift — not the commit. July 2026 refresh: IaC parity, intentional size deltas, drift checks that catch SG and parameter-group surprises.

Detect AWS config drift with terraform plan + Config. July 2026 runbook: schedule, triage, prevent console writes.

One bad `terraform apply` still deletes databases. July 2026: plan→review→apply, no -auto-approve, OIDC CI, Atlantis/HCP Terraform gates.

AWS provider 6.0 GA June 2025. July 2026: upgrade 4→5→6 one major at a time, changelog-first, staging plan, lockfile commit.

Terraform on AWS: import, state mv/rm, stuck locks. July 2026 — S3 use_lockfile (TF 1.10+); DynamoDB locking is legacy.

ECS blue/green without downtime: CodeDeploy canary/linear still works — and native ECS BLUE_GREEN (2025+) is now a first-class path. July 2026 checklist: hooks, alarms, dual-run cost.

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.

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.

Vite 8 (March 2026) ships Rolldown by default. July 2026: Bun install, SWC, CodeBuild cache — cut CI build minutes.

Production-grade GitHub Actions patterns for AWS workloads — OIDC authentication, pinned actions, blue-green deployments, build caching, and the security mistakes that leave your pipeline open to supply chain attacks.