ConfigWatcher-Architecture
Config-drift report
Function-Overview

🛠️ ConfigWatcher – Project Story

🌟 Inspiration

As a computer science student learning about DevOps and cloud-native development, I kept hearing how a single misconfigured environment variable could break an entire deployment. During one of my side projects, I accidentally left a debug flag enabled in production — and that made me realize how easy it is to let these small mistakes slip through.

I thought, what if I could build a smart assistant that watches over these config files and alerts me automatically? That's how ConfigWatcher was born — a serverless drift detection tool powered entirely by AWS Lambda.

🔍 What it does

ConfigWatcher is a tool that monitors .env files uploaded to an AWS S3 bucket and compares them across environments like local, staging, and production. It automatically detects:

❌ Missing keys
⚠️ Mismatched values

It then sends a clear and easy-to-read drift report to your inbox via Amazon SES, so teams or developers are immediately aware of any issues — before they reach production.

⚙️ How I built it

This project is completely serverless and cloud-native. Here's how I built it as a student:

Amazon S3 stores uploaded .env files
AWS Lambda does all the heavy lifting — reading files, comparing keys and values, and formatting the report
Amazon SES sends the drift alert emails
AWS IAM ensures secure access between these services
CloudWatch Logs helps debug and monitor Lambda performance

The Lambda function is written in Python. It gets triggered by an S3 event, processes the uploaded files, and emails a drift report automatically.

🧗 Challenges I ran into

Parsing .env files accurately, especially when formatting varied
Debugging SES email delivery and HTML formatting
Learning how to write proper IAM policies as a beginner
Testing the full flow — from upload to email — on the AWS Free Tier
Making sure it all worked smoothly within the limits of a student account

🏆 Accomplishments I'm proud of

I built a real-world DevOps automation tool completely as a student
Everything runs on the AWS Free Tier, making it accessible for others like me
I got hands-on experience with Lambda, S3, SES, IAM, and event-driven design
The tool requires no UI or login — everything is automated and delivered to your inbox