#aws
14 posts tagged aws.
- 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.
- 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.
- S3 quietly became a coordination serviceStrong consistency, then conditional writes, then managed tables. S3 can now do jobs that used to need a database or a lock table. Most architectures have not caught up.
- Savings Plans are bonds, not couponsA commitment is a fixed-income position on your own future usage. Finance teams have managed that kind of risk for a century. Borrow their playbook: ladder it.
- EMR clusters should die youngA long-running EMR cluster is a pet with a very large food bill. Treat clusters as disposable compute for a single job, and S3 as the only place data lives.
- The GPU line item is the new EC2 line itemAI workloads moved the biggest number on the bill. The playbook that tamed EC2 still applies, with two new metrics: GPU utilization and cost per request.
- On AWS, the SQL Server bill is a license billSQL Server 2016 reached end of extended support in July 2026, so a lot of databases are moving now. Before resizing anything, know that cores, not hardware, drive the cost.
- The best OS hardening is having less OSCIS checklists harden a general-purpose server one setting at a time. Minimal operating systems remove most of what those checklists were protecting. With Amazon Linux 2 now past end of support, it is a good moment to choose.
- AWS got safer by default. Your old accounts did not.New S3 buckets block public access, encrypt objects and disable ACLs out of the box. Accounts created years ago kept their old settings. A short list of what to check.
- Reserved concurrency is the best circuit breaker in AWSMost people meet Lambda concurrency as a limit to raise. Used deliberately, it is a dial that protects your database, isolates noisy functions and works as a kill switch.
- Terraform state is a production databaseIt holds every resource ID, sometimes secrets, and the only record of what Terraform thinks it owns. Treat it with the same care as the database it probably describes.
- Moving EC2 to ECS without anyone noticingThe best migration is one where the only people who notice are the ones reading the bill.
- Your certificate will expire on a SaturdayIt's a law of nature. Certificates expire on weekends, around 2 a.m., while the person who renewed it last year is on a beach with no signal.
- The cheapest EC2 instance is the one you turned offEvery cost review I've run starts the same way. Someone opens Cost Explorer, sorts by service, and EC2 sits at the top like it pays rent. It doesn't. You do.