livinstone.dev / blog
The Blog
Hands-on articles about Kubernetes, Terraform, GitOps, observability, and cloud infrastructure — based on things I've actually built and broken in production.
19 articles published
How I Cut Our Cloud Bill by $800 a Month — Without Reducing Reliability
A practical breakdown of how we reduced Datadog APM and log management costs by 15% — around $800/month — through log retention tuning, sampling strategies, and a Savings Plan. What worked, what did not, and the numbers behind each decision.
EKS Platform Engineering — Deploying and Scaling Applications on Kubernetes
The cluster is running. Now we put it to work. The decisions behind packaging with Helm, scaling with HPA, routing through an ALB, and keeping secrets out of Git.
Multi-Environment Infrastructure with Terraform: A Complete Guide
How to structure Terraform for real multi-environment deployments — separate state per environment, shared modules, and the exact setup to make it work end to end.
AWS Private Connectivity: Internet Gateway, NAT Gateway, and VPC Endpoints Explained
Three gateways, three different jobs. IGW for bidirectional internet access, NAT Gateway for outbound-only from private subnets, VPC Endpoints to reach AWS services without touching the internet at all. When to use which, how to configure each, and what they cost.