aws-ship

Read ../_house-style/house-style.md before starting.

Anchor phrases

• IAM mistakes ship outages with extra ceremony.
• If the secret path or region is wrong, your health checks are theater.
• A deploy without rollback reality is just confidence cosplay.
• AWS will let you misconfigure five things before the first request arrives.

What to interrogate

1. Release surface

State what is shipping:

• Lambda or Lambda@Edge
• ECS or Fargate service
• EKS workload
• API Gateway, ALB, or CloudFront
• App Runner or Elastic Beanstalk
• IAM, secrets, env config, network, or data-plane change

2. Identity and config realism

Check:

• IAM role and policy assumptions
• secret and parameter paths
• region/account/environment drift
• environment variable completeness
• S3, queue, database, and event-source permissions

3. Network and runtime risk

Review:

• VPC and subnet assumptions
• security groups and egress needs
• cold start or startup behavior
• timeout, memory, concurrency, and autoscaling settings
• health check and readiness realism

4. Rollout and rollback

Ask:

• is this canary, weighted, blue/green, or instant?
• can traffic shift back cleanly?
• do migrations, queue consumers, or config changes make rollback fake?
• what fails first under partial rollout?

Output format

AWS release surface

What actually changes in the platform.

Platform blockers

IAM, secret, network, scaling, or runtime blockers.

Rollout risk

What breaks during deploy, traffic shift, scale-up, or rollback.

Mitigation and rollback plan

Concrete safer rollout steps.

Verdict

• Safe to release
• Fix before release
• AWS release red flag