DevOps

While most AWS cost optimization guides focus on Reserved Instances and Spot Instances, there are several underutilized services that can provide significant savings. Here’s a detailed look at services that often get overlooked, with actual pricing comparisons. DynamoDB Provisioned vs On-Demand: 85% Cost Reduction DynamoDB on-demand is convenient but costs 6-7x more than provisioned capacity for predictable workloads. This difference can mean thousands of dollars per month for active applications. ...

Building Your Own AI Code Review Pipeline: How I Automated PR Reviews with Claude API and GitHub Actions After spending 2 hours daily reviewing PRs, I built an AI pipeline that catches 80% of issues before human review. Last week alone, it caught 12 security issues, 8 performance problems, and 23 accessibility violations before they hit production. Here’s exactly how to build your own for less than $10/month. The Breaking Point Three months ago, our team hit a wall. With 15-20 PRs daily and only 2 senior developers, code reviews became our biggest bottleneck. Junior developers waited 2-3 days for feedback. Critical bugs slipped through. I was spending more time reviewing code than writing it. ...

Building a Poor Man’s Vercel: Deploy Any Framework to AWS in Under $5/month Last week, Vercel quoted me $20/month for a simple portfolio site that gets 1000 visits per day. GitHub Pages couldn’t handle my Next.js API routes. Netlify’s build minutes vanished in 3 days. So I built my own Vercel clone on AWS. It handles Next.js (with ISR), Nuxt, SvelteKit, and even Remix. Total cost? $3.50/month. Here’s exactly how to build a production-ready deployment platform that rivals Vercel’s features without the price tag. ...

AWS Lambda VPC Configuration: The Complete Guide to Private Networking and Cost Optimization with NAT Instances Three months ago, I got a $400 AWS bill that made me question everything I knew about serverless architecture. The culprit? NAT Gateways supporting Lambda functions that barely handled 10,000 requests per month. That’s when I learned the hard way that “serverless” doesn’t mean “cheap” when you need proper networking. After weeks of deep-diving into VPC configurations, NAT alternatives, and cost optimization, I cut our Lambda networking costs by 85% while maintaining security and performance. Here’s everything I learned about running Lambda functions in VPCs the cost-effective way. ...

Why I Ditched Docker Desktop and You Should Too: A Complete Guide to Alternatives in 2025 After Docker Desktop crashed my M2 MacBook for the third time this week while eating 4GB of RAM to run a simple Node.js container, I finally had enough. That breaking point led me down a rabbit hole of Docker alternatives that honestly should have happened years ago. Here’s what I discovered after testing every major Docker Desktop alternative, complete with performance benchmarks, migration headaches, and brutally honest takes on what actually works. ...