Sometimes the best solution to a problem creates a new problem you didn’t expect. This is a story about fixing one Terraform error, only to discover that the fix itself introduces a whole new class of deployment challenges.

It started innocently enough - a Trivy security scan flagged 9 high-severity vulnerabilities in our Terraform configuration. The issue? Unencrypted SNS topics. The fix seemed straightforward: add a KMS key, encrypt the topics, deploy to dev for validation. What could go wrong?

We’ve all been there: you start the day feeling good about wrapping up last sprint’s work, coffee in hand, ready to tackle something new. Then comes the Slack notification that changes everything.

“Hey, can you look into why a couple of Lambdas didn’t run two weeks ago?”