DevOps & CI/CD

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.

CodePipeline isn't the most loved CI/CD tool — but it's the one that talks to every other AWS service natively. Pipeline architecture, CodeBuild configuration, cross-account deploys, and the patterns that ship code safely without bolting on a third-party runner.

June 30, 2026 added two major CloudFormation/CDK changes: pre-deployment validation on Create/Update and Express mode with up to 4x faster stack operations. This guide shows when to use each safely in production workflows.

CodePipeline costs a few dollars a month. GitHub Actions costs more at scale than most teams expect. Jenkins is free until you count the team running it. Integration, cost, scalability, and team fit across the three CI/CD options most AWS teams actually choose between.

Terraform is the multi-cloud default. CDK ships AWS features the day they GA. Language support, state management, multi-cloud flexibility, and the trade-off that determines which IaC tool fits your team — plus when running both is the right answer.

CloudWatch is the most underused service on every AWS bill — and the most overspent on the ones that take it seriously. Logs, metrics, and alarm patterns that catch real outages without burying you in noise (or in the bill).