Practical articles on AI, DevOps, Cloud, Linux, and infrastructure engineering.
AWS gives you four ways to pay for compute and three of them cut the bill. Here is how to pick, and how to stack them without painting yourself into a corner.
Three object stores, similar sticker prices, wildly different bills once retrieval and egress hit. Here is where the money actually goes.
The three big clouds are closer on list price than the sales decks suggest. Where they actually diverge is discounts, egress, and Windows licensing.
Moving our fleet from x86 to Graviton promised 20% savings. We got 31%, but only after fixing native dependencies, a broken base image, and one nasty perf regression.
A p99 that jumped to 3.4 seconds during traffic ramps turned out to be cold starts. Here's how we measured them properly and cut the tail, with real init timings.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
Three discounting mechanisms, three different commitments. The rules of thumb we use to pick, and the mistakes we made before settling on them.
