wckd14

Hi there.

I'm Malayil Vivekanandan.

I believe that good engineering starts with understanding the humans who depend on our systems. I spend my time designing cloud architectures that survive failure and refining the processes that keep teams confident and users protected.

This is where I share hard-won lessons from production—the failures that taught me the most, the patterns that actually held up under pressure. I write for engineers who care deeply about their craft and the people they serve. Read my takes, push back on my assumptions, and let's learn from each other.

Featured

• Terraform Modules from First Principles: Deterministic, Declarative, Idempotent

  Published:Feb 4, 2026 |  at 04:20 PM

  A first-principles way to design Terraform modules: make them deterministic, declarative, and idempotent—unless you have a good reason not to.

• VPN Not Working? Here's How MTU and Protocol Settings Can Fix It

  Published:Jan 14, 2025 |  at 07:18 PM

  A practical guide to fixing VPN packet fragmentation issues in 5G mobile networks through MTU optimization, based on a real-world troubleshooting case.

Recent Posts

• AWS "Pending" States Are a Blueprint for Async Deployments

  Published:Feb 8, 2026 |  at 03:00 PM

  Two AWS provisioning patterns (ACM PENDING_VALIDATION and RDS waiters) that quietly teach the shape of a good async deployment system.

What I'm Reading

• The Phoenix Project

  by Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, and George Spafford | Apr 15, 2024

  A novel about IT, DevOps, and helping your business win.

• Cloud Native DevOps with Kubernetes

  by John Arundel and Justin Domingus | Mar 10, 2024

  Building, deploying, and scaling modern applications in the cloud.