🚀 AWS Launch Template with Amazon Linux 2023 Standard EKS Images

With Amazon EKS 1.33 and later, AWS has deprecated Amazon Linux 2 (AL2) EKS AMIs and made Amazon Linux 2023 (AL2023) the default and mandatory base image.
This means all new EKS clusters and node groups must use AL2023 moving forward.

If you’re still using AL2-based worker nodes, now is the time to migrate to AL2023 and reschedule your workloads to new nodes.

AWS Invalid Credentials Issue — Time Sync Resolution

🧩 Problem Overview

While using AWS CLI, you might sometimes face the following error even when your credentials are correct: An error occurred (AuthFailure) when calling the DescribeVolumes operation: AWS was not able to validate the provided access credentials Example: aws ec2 describe-volumes –profile mycred

This error can be deceptive — it’s not always about wrong keys or permissions. In many cases, it’s caused by a time synchronization issue between your local VM and AWS servers.

How We Optimized Our AWS Costs by 50% — Real Lessons from the Field

A few days ago, we noticed a sudden and unexpected spike in our AWS billing while reviewing the AWS Cost Explorer dashboard. To our surprise, services like Druid, CloudWatch, S3, EC2, and RDS had all seen a drastic increase in costs compared to the previous two months — large enough to trigger escalations from our finance team.