Cdk · Standard Reader

subaudOct 15, 2026

Running muda on a Pipeline It Had Never Seen

The previous post covered the side project where muda's standard came from. The first pipeline muda ran on after that was an internal platform at work: an AWS CDK app with five Docker images, three ECS services, an AWS Batch compute environment and a small website. A dev deploy took 49 minutes. Like the side project, it had been built one feature at a time with Claude writing most of the code, and none of muda's rules had been written with it in mind. By the end, a dev deploy took about 14 min

CI/CDGitHub Actions

subaudOct 15, 2026

Finding the Waste in AI-Built Deploy Pipelines

In September a dev deploy of one of my side projects took 29 minutes, and a deploy of a commit that changed nothing updated all 11 of its CloudFormation stacks and rebuilt both of its Docker images. The pipeline had been built the way I build most things now, one feature at a time with Claude writing most of the code, and each piece of it had been correct when it was added. I started muda to find out where those minutes went. It began as an audit script and a written standard inside that proje

CI/CDGitHub Actions

subaudAug 23, 2026

OAuth for MCP Servers with Cognito and Okta

When I added OAuth to the MixCraft MCP server, the identity provider was Clerk, and Clerk did the whole job: it was the OAuth authorization server the MCP client talked to, it signed in the user, and it issued the tokens the MCP server verified. The next remote MCP server I put behind a login had users who already sign in through Okta, so Okta had to be where the sign-in happened. Okta is the identity provider here, but most of the configuration is on the Cognito side: a Cognito user pool federa

MCPOAuth

subaudJul 31, 2026

Authoring an llms.txt for AI Agents

The first consumer of my runner-set library — a CDK construct that runs GitHub Actions jobs on Lambda MicroVMs — was another of my own repos, and the migration was done by an AI agent. The Claude session that moved its nine CI jobs onto the runners filed a field report, and reading it back, every failure it hit traced to something the documentation didn't say, not something it said wrong. The docs never said whether a job can run Docker. The agent probed, hit a sudo failure (no_new_privs is se

documentationAgents

subaudJul 6, 2026

A CDK Lambda Bundle-Size Gate for CI

A deploy in one of my CDK projects passed every gate I have — CI, cdk synth, code review — and merged. The CloudFormation stack deployment to AWS failed with: InvalidRequest: Unzipped size must be smaller than 262144000 bytes 262,144,000 bytes is 250 MiB, AWS's hard limit on the unzipped deployment package of a zip-packaged Lambda. A few transitive dependencies had crept in and pushed one function's bundle over the edge. It failed in an uncomfortable place. cdk synth builds the CloudForma

AWSCDK

Devtools FMMay 10, 2026

Sam Goodwin - Alchemy

Sam Goodwin introduces Alchemy, a modern infrastructure-as-code tool built with Effect that challenges the tech debt of current solutions.

infrastructure as codeai

subaudMar 14, 2026

Printing Zebra Labels from a Browser

A friend runs a lab with custom software that handles sample tracking, inventory management, and reporting. It does nearly everything they need — except print labels. They have Zebra thermal printers on the network and a collection of ZPL templates, but the software has no integration with the printers, so printing labels was cumbersome and time consuming. I built a web app to close that gap — select a printer, paste or upload ZPL, hit print. The whole thing runs as a static React site on S3 a

ZebraBrowser Print

subaudMar 12, 2026

MixCraft - A hosted music assistant MCP

Several months ago, I was looking for some new music and decided to give Claude a crack at finding me some new music. i'm trying to make an album based playlist. It should consist of 3 (mostly) complete albums. Right now I have Hum - Downward is Heavenward and Weezer - Pinkerton. These two go together very well. Is there a third album we can include in this? This fairly innocuous prompt resulted in Claude suggested a completely unknown to me band that very quickly became one of my

MCPAWS

subaudMar 4, 2026

Teaching Claude to Teach AWS

A friend had been building a web app with Claude Code — Express server, vanilla HTML/CSS/JS, in-memory data storage. The app worked and kept growing. But it was running on her laptop with no deployment, no database, and no auth. She needed to get it to AWS and had limited experience with cloud infrastructure. I couldn't see her code, so I built a Claude Code plugin that could walk her through the deployment. The plugin analyzes an Express app, converts routes to Lambda functions, sets up S3 +

Claude CodeAWS

subaudFeb 22, 2026

Modernizing a CDK Project - WebSocket Server with Fargate

I recently revisited cdk-websocket-server, a demo I published in 2023 for running a WebSocket server on ECS Fargate behind CloudFront. The original worked, but it carried unnecessary complexity — EC2 instances backing a Fargate cluster, a custom Lambda to patch CloudFront headers, and a single-stage Docker build running as root. Here's what changed and why. Dropping the EC2 Auto Scaling Group The original created an EC2 Auto Scaling Group alongside the Fargate cluster: // Old approach con

AWSCDK

subaudDec 25, 2025

Securing AWS S3 with Cloudflare: The Worker Direct Fetch Pattern

When building a React SPA with Cloudflare as the CDN it is possible to use S3 for static asset storage. If you have all of your resources typically on AWS, but want some of the advantages of Cloudflare, you can build a system that is very similar to the traditional Cloudfront + S3 architecture. There are a few differences in deployments and setup, but it is generally the same. The typical approach with Cloudflare uses S3 static website hosting with IP restrictions, but this comes with significan

CloudflareAWS

subaudSep 22, 2025

Ghost on AWS: ActivityPub Federation

Ghost recently released ActivityPub support, enabling Ghost blogs to participate in the Fediverse alongside Mastodon, Threads, and other federated platforms. Through extensive testing and production deployment, we discovered that the official ActivityPub container has a bug that prevents self-hosted ActivityPub deployments from working. Combined with AWS-specific networking challenges, we had to modify the container source code to achieve working federation. Common Errors Through the proces

GhostCDK

subaudSep 15, 2025

Ghost on AWS: Email and Newsletter Automation

Ghost handles email differently than most CMS platforms. It ships with newsletter capabilities built-in but requires external SMTP for transactional emails and lacks automated digest features entirely. This post covers setting up both transactional email through Mailgun and building an automated weekly digest system using AWS Lambda and EventBridge. The weekly digest system we built sends every Monday at 9 AM, compiles posts from the past week into bookmark cards, and integrates with Ghost's n

CDKGhost

subaudSep 13, 2025

Ghost on AWS: S3 Storage and CloudFront CDN

Running Ghost in containers presents a storage challenge. Container filesystems are ephemeral - when a container restarts, any locally stored files disappear. This includes all uploaded images, making local storage unsuitable for production Ghost deployments on ECS. The solution uses S3 for persistent storage and CloudFront for global content delivery. Ghost uploads images to S3, which persist across container restarts and scale across multiple container instances. CloudFront serves these imag

CDKGhost

subaudSep 11, 2025

Ghost on AWS: Core Infrastructure with CDK

Ghost requires a MySQL database, persistent storage for content and images, and a way to handle traffic at scale. AWS provides these through RDS Aurora, EFS, S3, and ECS Fargate. This post walks through deploying the core infrastructure using AWS CDK, which allows us to define everything as TypeScript code rather than clicking through the AWS console. The infrastructure we're building costs approximately $175 per month. The largest costs are the database ($47/month) and NAT Gateway ($32/month)

CDKArchitecture

subaudJul 26, 2025

Deploying AWS Applications with Cloudflare Workers and Cloud Connector

A comprehensive guide on using Cloudflare as a security and CDN layer for AWS-hosted applications, with edge-level API key injection

AWSCDK

LocalStack BlogJul 24, 2025

Why I Run My AWS Serverless Apps Locally First (and You Probably Should Too)

Tired of waiting on CloudFormation, racking up bills, and debugging invisible resources? Learn how to run a real serverless app (S3, Lambda, SQS, and DynamoDB) entirely on your laptop using LocalStack, with step-by-step commands and explanations.

Cloud DevelopmentServerless

LocalStack BlogJul 24, 2025

Why I Run My AWS Serverless Apps Locally First (and You Probably Should Too)

Tired of waiting on CloudFormation, racking up bills, and debugging invisible resources? Learn how to run a real serverless app (S3, Lambda, SQS, and DynamoDB) entirely on your laptop using LocalStack, with step-by-step commands and explanations.

Cloud DevelopmentServerless

LocalStack BlogJul 24, 2025

Why I Run My AWS Serverless Apps Locally First (and You Probably Should Too)

Tired of waiting on CloudFormation, racking up bills, and debugging invisible resources? Learn how to run a real serverless app (S3, Lambda, SQS, and DynamoDB) entirely on your laptop using LocalStack, with step-by-step commands and explanations.

Cloud DevelopmentServerless

LocalStack BlogJul 24, 2025

Why I Run My AWS Serverless Apps Locally First (and You Probably Should Too)

Tired of waiting on CloudFormation, racking up bills, and debugging invisible resources? Learn how to run a real serverless app (S3, Lambda, SQS, and DynamoDB) entirely on your laptop using LocalStack, with step-by-step commands and explanations.

Cloud DevelopmentServerless

LocalStack BlogJul 24, 2025

Why I Run My AWS Serverless Apps Locally First (and You Probably Should Too)

Tired of waiting on CloudFormation, racking up bills, and debugging invisible resources? Learn how to run a real serverless app (S3, Lambda, SQS, and DynamoDB) entirely on your laptop using LocalStack, with step-by-step commands and explanations.

Cloud DevelopmentServerless

LocalStack BlogJul 24, 2025

Why I Run My AWS Serverless Apps Locally First (and You Probably Should Too)

Tired of waiting on CloudFormation, racking up bills, and debugging invisible resources? Learn how to run a real serverless app (S3, Lambda, SQS, and DynamoDB) entirely on your laptop using LocalStack, with step-by-step commands and explanations.

Cloud DevelopmentServerless

LocalStack BlogJul 24, 2025

Why I Run My AWS Serverless Apps Locally First (and You Probably Should Too)

Tired of waiting on CloudFormation, racking up bills, and debugging invisible resources? Learn how to run a real serverless app (S3, Lambda, SQS, and DynamoDB) entirely on your laptop using LocalStack, with step-by-step commands and explanations.

Cloud DevelopmentServerless

LocalStack BlogJul 24, 2025

Why I Run My AWS Serverless Apps Locally First (and You Probably Should Too)

Tired of waiting on CloudFormation, racking up bills, and debugging invisible resources? Learn how to run a real serverless app (S3, Lambda, SQS, and DynamoDB) entirely on your laptop using LocalStack, with step-by-step commands and explanations.

Cloud DevelopmentServerless