soft guideINFRASTRUCTURE & ADVISORY

Notes / How the platform works

Notes from
the platform.

One topic per note: what each part of the platform does, why it is built that way, and what it costs. Open a note to read it here, step through the rest, or open its own page.

Note 01

Terraform to Flux through one ConfigMap

The GitOps Bridge pattern for Flux: Terraform publishes the AWS facts once, every manifest substitutes them, and no manifest names an account, a region or an ARN.

  • Terraform
  • Flux
  • GitOps
  • AWS
Note 02

Cilium from the first node, and why not the VPC CNI

Why the platform creates EKS without the VPC CNI and kube-proxy, what Cilium in ENI mode gives that the default does not, and what it costs.

  • Kubernetes
  • Cilium
  • AWS
Note 03

One way out to the internet, three fences around it

How the Secure package makes a cluster unable to reach the internet except through one allowlisting gateway, and why one control is never enough.

  • AWS
  • Kubernetes
  • Cilium
  • Envoy
  • Security
Note 04

Capabilities: a network policy model that does not drift

A default-deny network policy model where workloads declare dependencies by label, destinations admit the same label, and a narrowly privileged pipeline applies it all.

  • Kubernetes
  • Cilium
  • GitOps
  • Security
Note 05

Testing admission policies both ways

Kyverno CEL policies with fixtures that must pass and fixtures that must fail, reported in development and enforced in production from the same files.

  • Kubernetes
  • Kyverno
  • Security
Note 06

Guardrails an AWS account inherits on day one

Service and resource control policies attached once per OU, tested offline, and changed only after replaying real CloudTrail history against them.

  • AWS
  • Security
  • Terraform
Note 07

Atlantis, and a policy a pull request cannot weaken

Plans on every pull request, conftest checks on the plan itself, applies only of the reviewed plan, and policies baked into the image that runs them.

  • CI/CD
  • Atlantis
  • Terraform
  • Security
Note 08

Three products from one repository with Terramate

One variable selects the package, Terramate composes the stacks, and a renderer gives each client a repository that contains only what they bought.

  • Terraform
  • Terramate
Note 09

Upgrades a client receives as a pull request

How a turnkey platform keeps moving after handover: a baseline branch in every client repository, and Git merging new releases with the client's own changes.

  • GitOps
  • Terraform
  • CI/CD
Note 10

One IAM role for every service, and no neighbour's secrets

EKS Pod Identity session tags turn one shared role into per-service permissions: a pod reads only the secrets, tables and buckets under its own namespace and service account.

  • AWS
  • Kubernetes
  • Security
Note 11

Nodes without internet: Bottlerocket and ECR pull-through cache

How nodes start, join and pull images when their subnets have no route out, and what that removes from the attack surface.

  • AWS
  • Kubernetes
  • Security
Note 12

An SRE agent inside the cluster that never acts alone

oncall-kit for behaviour, Claude Tag for the conversation, self-hosted runners in the cell for the data: how the Autonomous package builds its agents.

  • AI agents
  • Observability
  • Kubernetes
  • Security
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