At some point, every infrastructure diagram becomes fiction. A quick fix here. A hot patch there. A change made “just this once” to get things back online. Weeks later, production still works, but nobody is entirely sure why. That quiet gap between what you think is running and what’s
Uptime numbers look simple. Systems are either up or down. In reality, availability is a spectrum, and fault tolerance sits at the far and expensive end of it. High availability and fault tolerance are often used interchangeably. They shouldn’t be. They solve different problems and come with very different
Scaling in the cloud often sounds easier than it actually is. Add more instances. Put a load balancer in front. Problem solved. Until traffic increases, users start getting logged out, and things behave inconsistently across servers. More often than not, the root cause isn’t compute or networking. It’s
Cloud outages rarely start with something dramatic. It’s usually a small change. A dependency times out. A zone hiccups. Someone deploys on a Friday. Designing for failure isn’t about being pessimistic. It’s about being realistic. In the cloud, failure is not a surprise event. It’s a
Everyone has a disaster recovery plan. Some of them are written down. Others exist only as optimism. Disaster recovery sounds dramatic, but most real disasters are surprisingly boring. A region goes down. A deployment wipes the wrong database. An account gets locked. The problem isn’t the failure itself. It’
At some point, every system breaks. The only real question is whether you find out from a dashboard or from a Slack message that starts with “Hey, are you seeing this too?” That’s where monitoring and observability come in. The two terms get used interchangeably, often incorrectly, and usually
At some point in every cloud journey, someone confidently says, “Don’t worry, we have snapshots.” And at some later point, usually around 3 AM, everyone realizes that statement was doing a lot of heavy lifting. Snapshots and backups sound similar. They both involve saving data. They both make people
In the beginning, there was order. Files were neatly named, backups were labeled by date, and storage bills were reasonable. Then came reality - log folders multiplied, test data never got deleted, and backups started taking over. Welcome to the world of data lifecycle management - the quiet discipline that
If you’ve ever tried to store something in the cloud, you’ve probably run into the Big Three of storage: object, block, and file. They sound interchangeable - they all hold data, right? But under the hood, they’re built differently, optimized differently, and priced differently. And using the
At first, cloud storage feels simple. You upload a file, and it’s there forever. But somewhere between "just one more backup" and "why is my bill higher than rent", you discover storage tiers. Every cloud has them, every bill depends on them, and every engineer
At some point, every growing app hits the same problem: one server isn’t enough. You add more, but then the question becomes - who decides where traffic goes? That’s where load balancers come in. They quietly sit in front of your app, deciding which server gets which request,
Networking in the cloud feels harmless until data starts leaving it. That’s when the meter shows and starts running. Egress is everything that goes out of your cloud - downloads, cross-region sync, CDN misses - and it’s the line item that sneaks up on teams the most. The