Practical articles on AI, DevOps, Cloud, Linux, and infrastructure engineering.
We moved 40 TB of user media off S3 and cut the bill by 70 percent, mostly by killing egress fees. Here's where R2 won and where we kept S3 anyway.
Our failover config looked perfect in the console and did nothing during a real outage. Here's the health-check design that actually flipped regions when it mattered.
A single NAT Gateway quietly billed us $2,900 in one month, mostly for data processing on traffic that never needed to leave the VPC. Here's how we found it and cut it.
Our S3 bill tripled in a month with no growth in stored data. The storage line was flat. The cost was in requests and a misconfigured lifecycle rule quietly shredding money.
We rotated a leaked AWS access key that a workflow had committed to logs. Switching GitHub Actions to OIDC federation meant no static AWS keys exist to leak in the first place.
Static service tokens leaked into logs and never rotated. SPIFFE identities plus SPIRE-issued SVIDs gave us short-lived certs and killed the shared-secret sprawl.
We had long-lived AWS keys sitting in a datacenter we don't own. IAM Roles Anywhere let us delete every one of them. Here's the real setup.
How we cut auth redirect latency to single-digit milliseconds and ran A/B tests without a flash of wrong content, using Vercel Edge Middleware.
We moved a rewrite-heavy request path off Lambda@Edge to Workers and cut p95 from 340ms to 41ms. Here's when that swap pays off and when it doesn't.
Both put SQLite near your users, but they solve replication and write latency very differently. We ran the same schema on both for a month and picked one.
Least privilege fails when it's a one-time audit that locks things down until something breaks, then gets reverted. The iterative, log-driven approach that tightens permissions safely — and the policies we stopped writing by hand.
The cache-control header most teams under-use. How stale-while-revalidate and stale-if-error turned our CDN from a freshness liability into a latency and resilience win — with the gotchas.
