Writing
War stories from production — Kubernetes, AWS, Terraform, and database migrations from running infrastructure at scale.
2026-07-16
My site went down with 504s and my first instinct was 'out of memory.' The server was fine — AWS's VPC-origin plumbing had silently stopped forwarding traffic. Here's how I proved it, worked around it, and reverted once AWS fixed it.
2026-07-15
I had the feature designed, the prompt written, and the IAM key scoped. The one thing standing between me and a working AI feature was a payment method AWS wouldn't accept. Here's the blocker on the India region — and the model-agnostic escape hatch that let me ship the same day.
2026-06-23
XIRR Ledger just crossed 50 real portfolios. Here's why I built it, what the early numbers actually mean for retail investors, and where the product goes next.
2026-06-16
We migrated Aurora to RDS with zero downtime — then quietly paid for two databases for two months. The fix wasn't more knowledge. It was a forcing function.
2026-06-09
Our Aurora to RDS cutover went perfectly — pgcopydb, logical replication, all of it. Then the app wrote to RDS and every insert exploded. The cause: sequences.
2026-05-23
Most of us use the same 20% of Terraform daily. The rest turned up two features I wish I'd known sooner: ephemeral blocks and DynamoDB-free state locking.
2026-05-19
An idle public IP sat on my EC2 instance for months, billing me for nothing. The fix was simple — I'd just lacked the confidence to do it without downtime.
2026-05-14
A MyISAM → InnoDB migration looked routine until bulk CSV ingestion crawled. The slowdown wasn't a regression to undo — it was the engine doing exactly its job.
2026-04-23
Everyone treats Aurora as the premium PostgreSQL choice on AWS. But for regulated healthcare workloads, what mattered was how fast CVE patches actually land.
2026-01-15
Practical strategies that meaningfully cut my Kubernetes cluster costs on AWS — right-sizing, cluster autoscaling, spot instances, and storage optimization.