Terraform

AWS sent another reminder this week: Amazon Linux 2 support ends on June 30, 2026. That still sounds far enough away to ignore, right up until you remember all the places AL2 tends to hide. EC2 launch templates, golden AMIs, EKS managed node groups, ECS hosts, Packer builds, CI runners, old Lambda assumptions, and that one admin box nobody has opened since 2021. I started treating this as an infrastructure migration, not an operating system upgrade. That framing matters. If the plan is to SSH into machines and upgrade them in place, the day is already heading in the wrong direction. The cleaner path is inventory, rebuild, roll, observe, then delete the old capacity. ...

Last month I finally pulled the trigger. After months of watching the OpenTofu project mature and HashiCorp’s licensing situation settle into something I wasn’t comfortable with for client work, I migrated 47 Terraform modules across three production environments to OpenTofu. It took about two weeks of actual work spread over a month, and most of it was smooth. Most. Why I Switched The BSL license change was the catalyst, but not the only reason. A few of my clients started asking uncomfortable questions about their Terraform Enterprise contracts. One of them got a letter from HashiCorp’s sales team that made the cost trajectory pretty clear. OpenTofu had reached a point where the risk of staying felt bigger than the risk of moving. ...

I have deleted an S3 bucket exactly once and regretted it immediately. Back in 2022, I tore down a staging environment, and within a few hours someone else had claimed the same bucket name. A CloudFormation stack in another account kept happily writing logs to a bucket I no longer controlled. Not my favorite Friday. AWS has finally shipped a real fix: account regional namespaces for S3 general purpose buckets. It took about seven years, which feels both absurd and very on-brand. ...