Moving the VPC and Aurora that predated Terraform out of a CloudFormation stack — how fourteen resources split into two roots, the two apply roles built for them, and the IAM gaps that eight review rounds found before anything was applied.
Standing up the EKS cluster on top of the comment-approved pipeline — a NAT instance that costs a quarter of the gateway, three applies to finish one plan, an input that leaks into the next plan, and ArgoCD installed once from outside with every other Application kept in Git.
Keeping a deploy robot from growing its own power — short-lived OIDC credentials instead of stored keys, a permissions boundary on every role it creates, permission and creation split into two PRs, and EKS access entries as one line in the cluster’s roster.
How a three-person team made Terraform changes go through review and a PR comment — the deploy-config repo split off like a parcel box, plan and apply as two different badges, and one saved plan applied exactly once.