DevOps Unlocked @DevOps_Unlocked

Your root AWS account (or Azure Global Administrator account) should be locked down like Fort Knox. It should have a strong, unique password and be secured with a hardware MFA device (not SMS/Authenticator app). No active access keys. It should only be used for critical,…

Implement robust backup and disaster recovery (DR) strategies. Then, test them. Regularly. A backup that has never been restored is not a backup; it's just data sitting on a disk. Define clear Recovery Time Objectives (RTO) – how quickly must services be restored – and Recovery…

Serverless is powerful, but understand its nuances, especially cold starts and cost implications for bursty or unpredictable workloads. While often touted as "cheaper," very high invocation counts or long-running executions can become surprisingly expensive. Cold starts can…

Use pre-commit hooks. This is a small investment that yields massive returns in code quality and consistency. Implement hooks to automatically run linters (e.g., terraform fmt, black for Python, prettier for JS), static analysis tools, and basic security checks before code is…

For HIPAA compliance, data residency and encryption at rest/in transit are non-negotiable, but often complex. Understand your cloud region choices and ensure that Protected Health Information (PHI) is stored and processed only in approved regions and encrypted using audited,…

Your Kubernetes ingress controllers need robust Web Application Firewall (WAF) rules and DDoS protection. Don't expose your clusters directly to the wild internet without proper edge security. WAFs protect against common web exploits (SQL injection, XSS), while DDoS protection…

Automate environment provisioning. Developers should be able to spin up a fresh, identical development, testing, or sandbox environment on demand, rapidly and reliably. If they're waiting days for an Ops ticket or copying an outdated VM image, your velocity is suffering.…

Understand your cloud provider's Shared Responsibility Model. This is not a technical detail; it's a compliance and security cornerstone. The cloud provider is responsible for security of the cloud (the underlying infrastructure, hypervisor, etc.), while you are responsible for…

Stop using the :latest Docker tag. Seriously. If you're deploying :latest to anything beyond your dev machine, you're playing Russian Roulette with your production. It's untraceable, non-deterministic, and a ticking time bomb. I've seen the dumpster fires it causes. My blueprint…

Don't fear database schema migrations in your CI/CD pipeline. Treating database schemas as version-controlled code is fundamental. Tools like Flyway (for Java-based apps) or Liquibase (agnostic) allow you to define schema changes as idempotent scripts, version control them in…

If your incident response plan lives only in a static document (e.g., Confluence, SharePoint), it's already dead. You must practice game days and chaos engineering regularly. Simulate failures, inject latency, kill random pods, or simulate region outages. Test your on-call…

Still exposing port 22 on a public bastion? It's a massive, unnecessary risk in 2025. I wrote the blueprint for a true zero-trust bastion using AWS Session Manager. No open ports. No SSH keys to leak. Fully auditable via Terraform. This is how you build a secure access model…

The Principle of Least Privilege (PoLP) applies not just to human users, but critically, to every service account and role. Every application, microservice, or serverless function should have only the minimum necessary permissions to perform its designated task and nothing more.…

The tightest IAM policy in the world will fail if your on-call engineer is afraid to use the emergency "break-glass" role. We spend months perfecting our Terraform modules, IAM policies, and RBAC roles. Yet, most security models collapse at the first sign of human friction. Why?…

The most dangerous role in Azure is the one you probably give to every developer: Contributor. 💣 It’s the ‘easy button’ that’s one wrong command away from deleting a production resource group. This is how major outages—and uncomfortable meetings with your CTO—happen. Stop…

Your default IAM policy is a ticking time bomb. 💣 Giving developers PowerUserAccess or Contributor rights isn't 'moving fast.' It’s a permanent backdoor waiting for a single typo or a leaked key to cause a catastrophic production outage. Most teams get this dangerously wrong.…

The Principle of Least Privilege (PoLP) applies not just to human users, but critically, to every service account and role. Every application, microservice, or serverless function should have only the minimum necessary permissions to perform its designated task and nothing more.…

Continuous Delivery means every commit to your main branch could go to production. This isn't a vague ideal; it demands robust, automated testing. If your unit, integration, and end-to-end tests aren't comprehensive enough to give you confidence to deploy with a single click,…

For scaling Terraform, especially with complex, multi-environment or multi-account deployments, Terragrunt or managed services like Terraform Cloud/Enterprise are essential. Simple terraform apply on a large monorepo becomes unmanageable. Terragrunt provides DRY (Don't Repeat…

Centralized logging isn't a luxury; it's a hard requirement for any distributed system. If your application logs are scattered across individual servers, containers, or serverless functions, you have zero chance of quickly diagnosing a cascading failure or a complex bug.…