Building, breaking, learning — a progression through AWS cloud and AI
GitHub Actions with OIDC federation eliminates long-lived access keys. The IAM role trusts the GitHub identity provider — no secrets to rotate or leak.
Structured prompts with explicit rules and JSON output format produce reliable, parseable AI responses. Temperature 0.1 for consistency, clear constraints for safety.
Moving from console clicks to SAM templates made deployments repeatable and reviewable. template.yaml becomes the single source of truth for infrastructure.
S3 events trigger Lambda, EventBridge schedules invoke checks, SQS decouples producers from consumers. Let AWS handle the orchestration.
HSTS, CSP, X-Frame-Options, and Content-Type-Options on CloudFront. Enterprise-grade security with a single response headers policy.
Reduced monthly infrastructure costs by 80% (~$100 → ~$20) by migrating from traditional EC2/RDS/ALB architecture to a fully serverless model. Cleaned up 6 unused CloudFront distributions, 3 S3 buckets, and 6 CloudFormation stacks. Every architecture decision considers cost.
After confirming changes work, always commit and push before starting the next task. Keeps the repo in sync with what's live and prevents drift.
CloudFront cache invalidation as the final CI/CD step ensures users see updates immediately. Without it, changes can take 24 hours to propagate.
Never deploy without a rollback plan. Back up before changes. Require explicit approval before each phase. Small mistakes compound in production.