Build production AWS foundations
Start with architecture boundaries, IAM, observability, failure handling, cost, and cleanup—the parts that determine whether a demo survives production.
Choose a structured pathStart learning
Choose a problem. Follow a path. Prove what you learned.
InfraTales is organised for engineers who want production judgement, not a pile of disconnected tutorials. Begin with one path and complete the practice before moving to the next lesson.
Pick your starting point
What are you trying to do today?
Compare architecture options
Use decision-led guides when you need to choose between services, justify a trade-off, or document why one design fits better than another.
Browse architecture decisionsUnderstand a production failure
Follow the signal, failure edge, likely cause, and response. Every useful diagnosis should leave you with a stronger runbook.
Browse failure breakdownsHow each lesson works
One consistent learning contract.
Answer
Get the recommendation and its conditions immediately.
Reason
Understand the system model, trade-offs, and rejected alternatives.
Practise
Build, diagnose, or work through a safe decision exercise.
Prove
Use expected evidence and a knowledge check to confirm the outcome.
Continue
Move to one explicit next lesson instead of another random article.
Flagship lessons
Start with reviewed, practical material.
AWS CDK S3 to Lambda via EventBridge: Full Cost and Architecture Breakdown
Most S3-to-Lambda setups skip CloudTrail data events entirely and pay for it later with brittle fan-out and zero audit trail. This post walks through a CDK TypeScript stack that routes S3 events through EventBridge properly — VPC placement, KMS encryption, Secrets Manager, cost model, and the failur
AWS CDK EC2 CodeDeploy Pipeline: ALB and Auto Scaling Without the 2am 502s
Wiring CodePipeline, CodeDeploy, and Auto Scaling in CDK sounds straightforward until your first real scale event cracks the deployment. This post walks the full architecture - VPC, ALB, ASG, SSM config, and the lifecycle hook settings that keep deploys clean under load.
AWS CDK Web App Deployment: VPC, Fargate, Aurora, and CloudFront Wired Together
Most CDK tutorials stop at 'it deployed.' This one covers the full aws cdk web application deployment stack - VPC isolation, Fargate on private subnets, Aurora with KMS, CloudFront, Secrets Manager rotation - and the six operational gaps that will wake you up at 2am if you skip them.