Writing
Notes on reliability, cloud cost and AWS by Abhinav C.
- torana: what a 5 MB reverse proxy taught me about latencyBuilding a small Rust reverse proxy, from 1,060 requests a second to parity with Caddy. Two changes did almost all of it, and neither was clever.
- The Kubernetes upgrade treadmill has a price tag nowEKS extended support costs six times the standard control plane price. Falling behind on Kubernetes versions used to be technical debt. Now it is a line item.
- Rate limits are product decisions, and AI agents just became your biggest customersAPI gateways have two very different kinds of limits: ones that protect your systems and ones that define what a customer bought. In 2026, agents that never sleep are testing both.
- Write every Boto3 script as if it will run twiceCloud scripts get retried, rerun and run against the wrong account. Five habits make them safe: idempotency, pagination, real retries, dry runs and explicit targets.
- A dashboard should answer one question in five secondsMost Grafana dashboards are a wall of every metric someone once found interesting. The good ones are designed like a page in a newspaper: one headline, read top to bottom.
- Your quality gate should only judge new codeGating on overall coverage punishes whoever touches old code and rewards nobody. Judge each change on its own, and the codebase improves as a side effect.
- Deploying is engineering. Releasing is a business decision.When shipping code and turning on features are the same event, every deploy carries business risk and every launch carries technical risk. Separating them is the most underrated change in release engineering.
- CDK is a compiler. Review the output.Teams review the TypeScript and deploy the CloudFormation. When those disagree, production follows the CloudFormation. Treat the synthesized template as the real artifact.