🚀 Lambda Deployments v2: Taking the Lambda deployment pipeline from MVP to production-ready

🚀 Lambda Deployments v2 Taking the Lambda deployment pipeline from MVP to production-ready 🧭 Introduction Back in October 2025, I wrote about automating Lambda deployments with GitHub Actions . That workflow was functional — it deployed Lambda functions and layers across multiple regions using hash-based change detection and OIDC authentication. But as I started relying on it more heavily, cracks began to show. There were bugs hiding in plain sight, the workflow was a single monolithic job, there were no tests, and the shell scripts had no guardrails. It worked, but it wasn't production-ready. So I decided to fix that — systematically. 🐛 Phase 1: Fixing What Was Broken The first step was finding and fixing bugs that were already there but hadn't surfaced yet. Compatible Runtimes Bug The --compatible-runtimes flag in the AWS CLI expects space-separated values like nodejs18.x nodejs20.x nodejs22.x . My workflow was passing a raw JSON array from jq -c .runtimes , which produced ["nodejs18