devops

n8n on EKS: queue mode, RDS Postgres, Redis/Valkey, ALB+WAF, IRSA. July 2026 production checklist.

Most DevOps guides teach what AWS services are. Production teaches what happens when 200 engineers use them together. Here's the gap.

AWS CLI v2 #10196 chmod'd streaming outputs to 0600 — including /dev/null. July 2026 retrospective: #10215 revert, host repair, pin-and-canary checklist.

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.

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.

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.