Building a new AMI is only part of updating EC2 instances. We still need to tell the Auto Scaling group to use it and replace the instances running the old image. EC2 Image Builder can write the output AMI ID to a parameter during distribution. A launch template can reference that parameter directly. The remaining part is to start an instance refresh when the value changes, which is not something natively supported by AWS. ...
We manage a self-hosted GitLab instance entirely through Terraform: groups, projects, branch protection, and even git branches. All of it lives in one shared module and gets applied with Terragrunt. We upgraded that module’s provider from v18 to v19. The whole thing took about two or three hours. In that time, an AI assistant sounded confident twice about things that were not fully correct. I caught only one of the two mistakes in time, and only because checking a confident answer against something else was already a habit for me, not because I noticed a problem first. ...
When terragrunt plan on a single module takes over two minutes before showing a single AWS API call, something is wrong. This post covers two distinct performance problems I found and fixed in a large multi-account Terragrunt setup (~15 AWS accounts, 400+ modules). The Problem Running terragrunt plan on our EKS cluster module was taking 2 minutes 27 seconds just to start. With debug logging enabled, the culprit was clear: ...
Earlier this year, AWS had a major Availability Zone outage in us-east-1. Only one AZ went down, but if your workloads were running there, you know how it went: alerts firing, runbooks open, manual fixes, and a race to move traffic before customers noticed. For those who were not lucky enough to be in a different AZ, it raised an obvious question: why isn’t there a button for this? There is. It’s called ARC Zonal Shift. ...
How to Manage Terraform/OpenTofu/Terragrunt Versions? How often do you need to switch Terraform, Terragrunt, or OpenTofu versions when jumping between projects? For me, it’s pretty often and honestly, I used to hate it. Package managers like brew only let you install one version of a tool at a time. So every time I needed a different version, I had to install it manually. Not fun. Handling Multiple Versions with Ease Thankfully, there are tools that make managing multiple versions much easier. Here are some of them: ...