Monthly Series
One actionable cloud engineering tip, delivered every month, with real examples and production context.
All tips, most recent first
Tip #1
Local state files with no locking mechanism are fine solo. The moment a second person runs terraform apply, you're one race condition away from a corrupted state file and a very bad afternoon.
Tip #2
Any traffic from a private subnet to S3 or DynamoDB that routes through a NAT Gateway costs $0.045 per GB in NAT data processing fees — on top of the NAT Gateway hourly charge. VPC Gateway Endpoints bypass the NAT Gateway entirely and carry no data processing fee. The Maths
Tip #3
Kubernetes uses resource requests to schedule Pods and limits to cap runtime consumption. Omitting either creates operational problems that are nearly impossible to debug under load. Requests vs Limits * Request — Reserved capacity the scheduler uses to find a suitable node. A Pod won't be placed unless a node
Tip #4
Spot Instances use spare EC2 capacity auctioned at discounts of up to 90% versus On-Demand pricing. AWS can reclaim them with a two-minute warning, making them ideal for workloads that can tolerate interruption. When to Use Spot * Data processing and ETL pipelines * Machine learning training jobs * CI/CD build agents
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