Hi, I’m Rohan

Backend engineer at StepSecurity, writing about Go, AWS, distributed systems and CyberSecurity. This is where I document discoveries, debugging adventures, and interesting technical rabbit holes.

My Terminal Tells All

A personal searchable reference of commands I actually use, built from my real zsh history.

May 18, 2026 · 20 min · Rohan Prabhu

Where Prometheus Fails: Catching Kubernetes Restarts in Real Time

Standard Prometheus alerts are great for capacity planning, but they are too slow to catch crash logs in high-churn Kubernetes environments. Here is why and how I built Kivert to solve it.

June 21, 2026 · 4 min · Rohan Prabhu

Kubernetes Init Containers: What the Docs Don't Tell You

Init containers seem simple: they run in order, they finish, and your app starts. But in production, resource shadowing, restart loops, and silent deadlocks can easily trigger an on-call page.

June 17, 2026 · 9 min · Rohan Prabhu

Why Your Client Is Hitting Someone Else's Website

ALBs don’t have static IPs. When AWS recycles your old IP and a client’s DNS cache hasn’t caught up, their requests go to someone else’s workload. Here’s what causes it and how to fix it with IPAM.

June 6, 2026 · 7 min · Rohan Prabhu

Running Kali Inside Claude Code with UTM and MCP

How I got a full Kali Linux environment talking to Claude Code on my Mac, so I can run security tools through an AI that actually understands what it’s doing.

May 25, 2026 · 8 min · Rohan Prabhu

Ship EC2 Logs to CloudWatch Without the Gotchas

The CloudWatch Agent setup is five commands. The reasons it silently fails are what nobody writes about — so here’s the gotchas first, setup second.

May 14, 2026 · 6 min · Rohan Prabhu

Don't Keep Data Forever: A Practical Guide to Database TTLs

Sessions, OTPs, and temporary tokens are piling up in your database right now. Here’s how TTLs let the database clean them up automatically, and why that’s better than every alternative you’ve tried.

April 7, 2026 · 8 min · Rohan Prabhu

How to Give AWS Lambda a Static IP

Lambda’s outbound IPs change every invocation. Here’s the right way to give it a fixed IP using a NAT Gateway, and the common mistakes that will waste your afternoon.

March 23, 2026 · 7 min · Rohan Prabhu

Goodbye, Manual AWS Credentials

How a single command, aws configure sso, ended my twice-daily ritual of copy-pasting AWS credentials and gave me back ten minutes a day.

February 13, 2026 · 6 min · Rohan Prabhu

AWS AssumeRole: The Complete Guide for Cross-Account Access

The complete guide to AWS cross-account access - including trust relationships and IAM permissions both sides need

December 12, 2025 · 4 min · Rohan Prabhu