DevOpsDreams

Terraform Security Best Practices for AWS: IAM Is Only One Layer Terraform security on AWS is not just a least-privilege IAM exercise. This guide shows how to harden runner identities, trust policies, state backends, validation gates, and provider dependencies so infrastructure changes fail safely instead of failing live. TL;DR Terraform security on AWS breaks in four places: the identity that runs Terraform, the policies and trust relationships it can assume, the state and plan artifacts it writes, and the provider or module dependencies it downloads. AWS and HashiCorp documentation point to a safer pattern: use temporary credentials and scoped roles, cap delegated access with permissions boundaries and organization guardrails, store state remotely with locking and recovery controls, keep secrets out of plans when possible, and pin plus lock providers and modules so reviewable code is the thing that changes. IAM matters, but it is not the whole attack surface. Terraform security i...

Implementing Kubernetes Pod Security Standards Without Breaking Production Most Pod Security Standards rollouts fail for a simple reason: teams jump straight to restricted without measuring what their workloads actually do. This guide shows how to move from audit to enforce with namespace labels , compliant pod specs, and clear exception boundaries. TL;DR Kubernetes Pod Security Standards are effective only when you treat them as an incremental enforcement program rather than a single label change. The modern path is Pod Security Admission, which became stable in Kubernetes v1.25 after PodSecurityPolicy was removed. A production rollout should start with warn and audit , pin policy versions, and then enforce baseline or restricted per namespace. The practical work is in fixing pod specs: run as non-root, drop Linux capabilities, disable privilege escalation , and set seccomp explicitly so application teams can pass admission without last-minute outages. Pod Security Standar...

Private Amazon EKS Clusters and Ingress Patterns: A Network Design Deep Dive Private EKS clusters fail when teams treat the private endpoint as the whole design. This deep dive covers API access, VPC endpoints, internal ALB/NLB ingress, private DNS, and operational failure modes. TL;DR Private Amazon EKS clusters are not just EKS clusters with the public endpoint disabled. They are VPC-bound operating environments where API access, node bootstrap, image pulls, IAM credential exchange, load balancer reconciliation, DNS, and operator access must all work without assuming public internet reachability. The reliable pattern is to separate control-plane access from workload ingress, keep nodes in private subnets, choose public, restricted-public-plus-private, or private-only API endpoints deliberately, expose applications through internal ALB/NLB or connected networks, and pre-build VPC endpoints, private DNS, and break-glass access before cutover. A private EKS design has four separate p...