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AWS Daily with Divine
Daily AWS scenarios from production. Real problems, real fixes, the practical knowledge AWS docs don't teach.
7 posts so far
Your Secrets Manager Bill Has Email Addresses In It. Look Here First.
Most teams default to Secrets Manager for every config value. Parameter Store is free for most of that. The cost difference is roughly 40x per entry.
5 min read
Cost Explorer Shows $800/Month in Data Transfer You Can't Explain. Look Here First.
Most teams pay NAT Gateway data-processing charges on S3 traffic without realizing it. The fix is an S3 Gateway Endpoint, and it's free.
3 min read
RDS Multi-AZ Failover Took 6 Minutes. Your SLA Requires 2.
Multi-AZ promotes the standby in 60 to 120 seconds. DNS caching, connection pools, and missing retries quietly stretch recovery beyond your SLA.
2 min read
CloudWatch Alarms Are Firing. You Open the Dashboard and See Nothing.
Three reasons your alarm fired without leaving evidence on the metric graph, and why ignoring them trains engineers to stop taking alarms seriously.
2 min read
Auto Scaling Is Adding Instances. Response Times Are Still Climbing.
Scaling kicks in, new instances launch, but response times keep rising and you can't understand why. The gap between InService and actually ready is where this lives.
2 min read
API Gateway Latency Spikes Every 30 Minutes Like Clockwork
If your latency spikes happen randomly, it's something else. If they happen every 25–30 minutes during low traffic, it's almost certainly Lambda cold starts.
2 min read
VPC Peering Configured. Route Tables Look Correct. Instances Still Can't Communicate.
Four things must be in place for VPC peering to actually work, and the most common culprit by far is the second one.
2 min read