Alibaba Cloud Full Stack (12): End-to-End — One Terraform Apply for Everything

Sat, 09 May 2026 09:00:00 +0000

Eleven articles. Dozens of CLI commands. Hundreds of manual steps. Now we throw all of that away and rebuild the entire stack with a single terraform apply. This is why infrastructure-as-code exists.

Over the past eleven parts of this series, we have clicked through consoles, typed aliyun CLI commands, and manually configured everything from VPCs to Function Compute triggers. It worked. We learned every resource intimately because we built each one by hand. But if I asked you right now to recreate that entire stack in a new region — the VPC with its three tiers and two availability zones, the ECS instance with its cloud-init script, the RDS MySQL HA setup, the OSS bucket with lifecycle rules, the RAM policies, the SLS log pipeline, the Function Compute event processing — you would need at least a full day of careful work. And you would inevitably miss something. A security group rule. A backup policy. A CORS configuration.

Cloud Computing (7): Cloud Operations and DevOps Practices

Fri, 26 May 2023 09:00:00 +0000

In 2017 GitLab lost six hours of database state. An engineer, exhausted, ran rm -rf on the wrong server during an incident. The backup procedures had silently been broken for months; nobody noticed because no one was restoring from backups. The lesson is not “be careful with rm”. The lesson is that operations is a system — tools, runbooks, monitoring, automation, and the rituals around them. When the system is healthy, no single tired engineer can take down production. When the system is rotten, every late-night fix is one keystroke from disaster.

CI/CD on Chen Kai Blog

Alibaba Cloud Full Stack (12): End-to-End — One Terraform Apply for Everything

Cloud Computing (7): Cloud Operations and DevOps Practices