Practical guides on CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure-as-code, AWS services, and real implementation challenges—born from building production systems as a solo developer.
I manage 4 CDK projects and 11 stacks from a single app.ts using project-specific factories, typed config modules, SSM-based discovery, and CDK Aspects. Here's how the pattern works and where it broke.
I wrote 30 custom Checkov rules in Python, wired them into a three-layer security pipeline with CDK-Nag and SARIF, and set up severity gating that warns in dev but blocks production. Here's the architecture and a real IMDSv2 bug it caught.
I deploy 4 CDK projects across 3 AWS accounts from a single GitHub repo using OIDC federation, a 465-line composite action, and environment-scoped Checkov scanning. 19 workflow files, zero long-lived credentials, and auto-rollback when smoke tests fail.
I run 7 Docker containers on one EC2 instance to get full metrics, logs, and traces for my ECS portfolio. Cloud Map DNS handles service discovery, SSM handles access, and the whole thing costs $15/month.
I run my Next.js portfolio on ECS with CloudFront, API Gateway, Lambda, DynamoDB, and S3 — split across 6 CDK stacks so that a task definition change never triggers an 8-minute CloudFront propagation. Auto-deploy from ECR pushes, circuit breaker rollbacks, and read-only containers.
How I eliminated a 5-hop API round-trip and replaced it with a sub-5ms VPC Gateway Endpoint read — traced end-to-end — for $0/month incremental cost. OpenTelemetry instrumentation, file-based fallback, and a 94% cost reduction on a Next.js portfolio running on ECS.
I scored 726 on my first attempt at the AWS DevOps Engineer Professional exam. The pass mark is 750. This is the study strategy, mental framework, and hands-on practice that got me through on attempt two — with architecture diagrams and worked examples.