Technology shifts. Sometimes gradually. Sometimes all at once. After more than 35 years in IT, I have learned to pay attention when the direction of the industry changes. In late 2024, I made a deliberate pivot from quantum computing research to applied artificial intelligence. Quantum computing remains fascinating, but the practical signal around AI was impossible to ignore. AI is not just another technology trend. It is becoming part of the operating fabric of modern busine

Over the past several weeks, I have been building a hands-on CI/CD lab using Tekton Pipelines running on Amazon EKS. The original goal was fairly straightforward: take an application stored in GitHub, automatically build a container image, push that image to Amazon ECR, and deploy it to Kubernetes. Eventually the basic pipeline looked something like this: GitHub ↓ Tekton ↓ BuildKit ↓ Amazon ECR ↓ Amazon EKS / Kubernetes ↓ Application Load Balancer ↓ HTTPS Application Getting

In Part 1 of this series, I built a working Tekton CI/CD pipeline on Amazon ECR and EKS and then spent time understanding how all of the pieces fit together. The pipeline worked. The application deployed. The public endpoint worked. The OpenRouter API call worked. But there was one fairly obvious problem: I did not want to pay to keep the entire AWS environment running when I was not using it. An EKS cluster, EC2 worker nodes, a NAT Gateway, load balancing, storage, and the r