Blog

Articles, videos, and write-ups on Cloud, DevOps, and Kubernetes.

Installing the ADOT Collector on EKS: Every Trap I Hit, and How I Got Out✦ ARTICLE
Jun 2026

Installing the ADOT Collector on EKS: Every Trap I Hit, and How I Got Out

A start-to-finish walkthrough of installing the AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry addon on EKS — cert-manager prereqs, the v1beta1 config gotcha, pod-density scheduling failures, and verifying traces actually land in X-Ray.

AWSEKSADOTOpenTelemetryObservabilityX-RayKubernetes
The conntrack DNS Race Condition in Kubernetes✦ ARTICLE
Jun 2026

The conntrack DNS Race Condition in Kubernetes

Why your pods get random 5-second DNS timeouts — a deep dive into the Linux conntrack table, the A vs AAAA query race through iptables SNAT, how to confirm it with conntrack -S, and four remediation paths including NodeLocal DNSCache.

KubernetesNetworkingDNSconntrackiptablesEKSDebuggingDevOps

Networking // Field Manual

✦ ARTICLE
May 2026

Networking // Field Manual

Five modules, one mantra. Move from packets on a wire to VPCs in the cloud, with a debugging arsenal in between. An interactive, offline-ready reference built for DevOps and cloud engineers.

NetworkingDevOpsCloudReference

What Actually Happens When Internet Traffic Reaches Your EKS Pod

✦ ARTICLE
May 2026

What Actually Happens When Internet Traffic Reaches Your EKS Pod

From Ingress YAML to a packet landing on your container — a full walkthrough of the AWS Load Balancer Controller, TargetGroupBinding, EndpointSlices, and the ready vs serving conditions that make rolling updates graceful.

AWSEKSKubernetesNetworkingALBIngressDevOps

How IRSA Really Works on EKS — and the One-Character Bug That Can Break It

✦ ARTICLE
May 2026

How IRSA Really Works on EKS — and the One-Character Bug That Can Break It

A deep dive into IAM Roles for Service Accounts on Amazon EKS — how the JWT-to-IAM-credentials exchange actually works, what STS checks under the hood, and why a single stray character in your OIDC provider configuration can silently break everything.

AWSEKSKubernetesIRSAOIDCSTSDebugging

What Actually Happens When You Run kubectl apply

✦ ARTICLE
May 2026

What Actually Happens When You Run kubectl apply

A walkthrough of every component your YAML touches — from your terminal to the running container. AuthN, admission, etcd, controllers, scheduler, kubelet, CNI, and beyond.

KubernetesEKSkubectlInternalsDevOps
How do I use an EC2 instance to connect to a private RDS DB instance from a local machine?▶ VIDEO
Oct 2025·Amazon Web Services

How do I use an EC2 instance to connect to a private RDS DB instance from a local machine?

A step-by-step walkthrough on securely connecting to a private Amazon RDS instance from your local machine using EC2 Instance Connect Endpoint — no bastion host or SSH tunnel required.

AWSRDSEC2Networking