33 posts tagged with "AWS"

You've been clicking through the AWS Console for weeks, creating VPCs, subnets, security groups, and EC2 instances by hand. Then someone says "recreate this in the staging account." Suddenly, your 47-step runbook doesn't feel so clever. CloudFormation fixes this: you describe your infrastructure in a YAML file, and AWS builds it exactly the same way every single time.

Imagine deploying code without provisioning a single server, without patching an OS, without worrying about scaling, and paying nothing when nobody's using it. That's Lambda. And once you build your first function, you'll wonder why you ever managed EC2 instances for simple workloads.

"Should we use Aurora or DynamoDB?" I've heard this question in every architecture review I've attended. The answer is never simple, because the question is wrong. You don't pick a database engine first — you pick it based on your access patterns, consistency needs, and budget. Let's build a framework for making the right call.

Every time you click through the AWS console to check an instance's status, you waste 30 seconds. Do that 20 times a day and you've lost 2.5 hours per week. The CLI is faster, scriptable, and gives you a history of exactly what you did. Here are 30 commands that will change how you work with AWS.

A developer once asked me: "Why can't my Lambda function reach the internet after I put it in a VPC?" The answer took 15 minutes to explain. VPC networking is where most AWS engineers hit a wall — and it's because nobody taught them the fundamentals first.

Here's a scenario that happens every single day: a team launches a c5.4xlarge for an app that uses 8% CPU. That's $500/month wasted. Multiply by 50 instances and you're throwing away $25,000 every month. Let's fix that.