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Ephemeral AWS Sandboxes: 80+ Isolated Environments at Half the Cost

· 3 min read
Pascal Nehlsen
DevSecOps Engineer

Giving every learner a shared environment is cheap and miserable — one person breaks it and everyone is blocked. Giving everyone a fixed, always-on instance is clean and expensive. This post is about a third option: per-user, production-like sandboxes on AWS that spin up on demand, clean themselves up, and cost about half what fixed-size instances would.

SLO-Driven Automated Rollback: Let the Metrics Pull the Cord

· 3 min read
Pascal Nehlsen
DevSecOps Engineer

A deploy that breaks production at 02:00 shouldn't wait for a human to wake up, read a dashboard, and decide to roll back. If you can define what "broken" means in terms your monitoring can measure, you can let the pipeline pull the cord itself. This post walks through wiring observability into deployment so that an SLO breach triggers an automatic rollback.

Agentic DevOps Runbooks with a Human-Approval Layer

· 3 min read
Pascal Nehlsen
DevSecOps Engineer

"Let the AI fix it" is a great way to turn a small incident into a large one. But most of the toil in incident response isn't the fix — it's the gathering: pulling logs, checking deploy history, correlating metrics, reconstructing what changed. That part is safe to automate. This post describes a runbook executor that automates the gathering and the proposing, while keeping a human firmly in front of anything destructive.

Golden Paths on GCP: Cutting Provisioning Time by 80% with Terraform

· 3 min read
Pascal Nehlsen
DevSecOps Engineer

The fastest way to slow a team down is to make them wait on infrastructure. When every new service means a four-hour manual walk through the GCP console, engineers batch their requests, context-switch while they wait, and quietly build snowflakes. This post is about replacing that ritual with a golden path — a paved, opinionated route that provisions a production-like environment in under 45 minutes, self-service.