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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
Init Containers and Sidecar Containers — What They Are and When to Actually Use Them
Init containers and sidecars solve two very different problems — one handles setup before your app starts, the other runs alongside it permanently. This article explains when each one makes sense, with real examples you can follow.
GitOps with Argo CD: A Practical Kubernetes Guide
Git becomes your deployment interface. With Argo CD, every change goes through a pull request, every rollback is a git revert, and the cluster continuously reconciles toward what Git says it should be.
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.
GitHub Actions CI/CD Pipeline to Kubernetes — From Code Push to Live Deployment
A complete end-to-end CI/CD pipeline using GitHub Actions — linting, testing, building a Docker image, pushing to ECR, and deploying to Kubernetes automatically on every merge to main. Full working configuration included.
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.
Kubernetes Debugging: The Commands I Actually Use When Things Break
A practical debugging guide based on real incidents — how to systematically diagnose pod crashes, scheduling failures, networking issues, and performance problems using kubectl. With actual commands and what to look for in the output.
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.