Terraform news and engineering summaries

A tech leader reflects on four years of infrastructure decisions for a scaling startup. Key endorsements include AWS, EKS, RDS, and GitOps for stability and customer focus. Regrets involve EKS managed addons, Datadog's pricing, and shared databases. Recommendations emphasize simplicity, automated post-mortems, and early adoption of identity platforms like Okta.

Coder is a self-hosted platform for cloud development environments and AI coding agents. Terraform defines workspaces across EC2, Kubernetes, and Docker, while idle shutdown reduces costs. Coder Agents run in the control plane without exposing API keys in workspaces, enabling centralized model governance, identity-based access, auditing, and cost tracking.

Read the Docs endured a nearly ten-day, globally distributed DDoS attack peaking at 5.5 million requests per minute, using randomized fingerprints, cache evasion, and adaptive traffic. Cloudflare, aggressive edge caching, targeted challenges, multidimensional rate limits, WAFs, and Terraform-managed rules preserved availability. Key lessons: cache redirects and errors, protect cache-miss surfaces, and avoid relying on IP blocking alone.

Cloudflare now supports HTTP `Vary` in Cache Rules on all plans. Origins identify headers that may change responses, while operators choose `normalize`, `passthrough`, or `bypass` to balance correctness and cache efficiency. Normalization consolidates equivalent negotiation requests, while bypass protects against personalized or high-cardinality values such as `Cookie` and `User-Agent`.