FactualMinds Blog
Expert perspectives on AWS cloud consulting, generative AI, and enterprise solutions.
One bad `terraform apply` still deletes databases. July 2026: plan→review→apply, no -auto-approve, OIDC CI, Atlantis/HCP Terraform gates.
AWS provider 6.0 GA June 2025. July 2026: upgrade 4→5→6 one major at a time, changelog-first, staging plan, lockfile commit.
Terraform on AWS: import, state mv/rm, stuck locks. July 2026 — S3 use_lockfile (TF 1.10+); DynamoDB locking is legacy.
TwinMaker still earns its keep when spatial context beats line charts. July 2026 refresh — SiteWise connectors, Dynamic Scene, AMG (not SiteWise Monitor), and when a 3D twin is overkill.
SOC 2 Type II certification proves your controls are effective over 6-12 months. This guide covers the compliance roadmap, AWS security controls, documentation requirements, and audit preparation for 2026 certification.
Amazon Bedrock Agents Classic automate workflows by giving foundation models the ability to call tools (APIs, Lambda, databases). This guide covers building agents with tool definitions, testing in the console, handling errors, and scaling to production.
Amazon Bedrock Knowledge Bases automate the RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) pipeline — semantic search, chunking, embedding, and context injection into Claude or other foundation models. This guide covers setup, data ingestion, cost optimization, and production patterns.
Glue ETL + Athena SQL without servers — still the default lake path. July 2026: Glue 5.x jobs, Parquet partitions, ~$0.44/DPU-hour + $5/TB scan math, pipeline checklist.
WAF beyond “enable managed rules”: COUNT→BLOCK, rate limits, Bot Control cost traps, GraphQL depth. July 2026 API protection checklist.
Karpenter replaces Kubernetes Cluster Autoscaler with intelligent bin-packing and just-in-time node provisioning. This guide covers setup, consolidation, cost optimization, and production patterns for EKS clusters.
ECS blue/green without downtime: CodeDeploy canary/linear still works — and native ECS BLUE_GREEN (2025+) is now a first-class path. July 2026 checklist: hooks, alarms, dual-run cost.
HIPAA on AWS build guide: BAA via Artifact, eligible services, KMS/VPC/RDS/S3 patterns. July 2026 engineering checklist.