Insights for Builders

Skip the ALB and the NAT Gateway entirely and a tiny always-on Fargate container costs a few dollars a month instead of fifty. We built it for real, verified the numbers against official AWS docs, and hit both gotchas ourselves — one AWS documents in a place you won't find until after you've already failed, and one it doesn't document at all.

Beanstalk's new Cluster Mode runs your app on a shared, AWS-managed EKS cluster instead of dedicated EC2 instances — powered by the same EKS Auto Mode compute layer we've covered before. The deploy experience gets simpler; the constraints are real, and some of them are permanent.

Kubernetes and Nomad solve the same problem — scheduling workloads across a cluster — from opposite design philosophies. This is a head-to-head on the details that actually decide the outcome: scheduler architecture, HCL vs YAML for the same real deployment, networking, storage, security, autoscaling, and a concrete migration path either direction.

Postgres spawns one OS process per client connection — expensive, and capped by max_connections. A fleet of application pods, or bursty serverless workloads, exhausts that cap fast. PgBouncer sits in front of Postgres and multiplexes many client connections onto a small pool of real ones. Here's how it works, the three pooling modes, and what actually breaks in transaction mode.

Redis on Kubernetes comes down to one decision made early and hard to reverse later: Sentinel for single-master high availability, or Cluster mode for sharded horizontal scale. Here's what each actually requires operationally, and when self-hosting either beats paying for a managed cache.

terraform test has been built into the CLI since 1.6, and since 1.7 it can mock providers entirely — asserting on plan output without touching a real cloud account. Here's how run blocks, assert blocks, and mock_provider actually work, and where the native framework stops and Terratest still has to take over.