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The Secret Life of AWS: The Cockpit (Amazon CloudWatch Dashboards)

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  The Secret Life of AWS: The Cockpit (Amazon CloudWatch Dashboards) # aws # cloudwatch # devops # cloud Stop switching tabs. How to build a "Single Pane of Glass" for your application. Part 34 of The Secret Life of AWS Timothy looked like he was playing the piano. His fingers were flying across  Alt+Tab , switching between browser windows at a frantic pace. "Lambda console... check," he mumbled. "No errors." Click. "DynamoDB console... check. Latency is good." Click. "API Gateway console... check. 500s are low." Click. "X-Ray console... check. Service map is green." He sat back, exhausted. It was 9:15 AM, and he had already spent fifteen minutes just verifying that his system was alive. Margaret watched him from the doorway, sipping her coffee. "That is quite a morning workout, Timothy," she said. "I have to check everything," Timothy explained, rubbing his eyes. "We have the Concurrency Limit ( Part ...

The Secret Life of Go: Concurrency Patterns

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  The Secret Life of Go: Concurrency Patterns # go # coding # programming # softwaredevelopment From naive goroutines to production-grade concurrency. Chapter 23: The WaitGroup, The ErrorGroup, and The Safety Net "Three hundred milliseconds," Ethan sighed, staring at his dashboard metrics. "It's too slow." "What is too slow?" Eleanor asked, pulling up a chair. "This user profile page," Ethan pointed. "To build it, I have to fetch three things: the user's details, their recent posts, and their account stats. Each database query takes 100 milliseconds. Since I do them one after another, the user waits 300 milliseconds." "And you want to do them all at once?" "Exactly," Ethan said. "If I run them in parallel, it should only take as long as the slowest one—100 milliseconds." He started typing furiously. "I'll just put the  go  keyword in front of each function call!" func GetDashboard () ...

The Secret Life of Azure: The Resource Group That Became a Junk Drawer

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  The Secret Life of Azure: The Resource Group That Became a Junk Drawer # azure # cloudgovernance # devops # cloudarchitecture Organizing Azure resources through lifecycle boundaries and protective locks. Governance & Guardrails The morning sun hit the library chalkboard, and Margaret was already there, erasing some old notes. Timothy walked in, coffee in hand, looking a little stressed as he opened his notebook. "You look like you've been chasing a ghost in the logs, Timothy," Margaret said with a warm, knowing smile. Timothy let out a short laugh. "Worse. I'm chasing my own tail. I went to clean up that 'temp' project I built last month, but my Resource Group is a mess. I’ve got a SQL database sitting next to a bunch of test VMs, and now I’m terrified to hit 'delete' because I can't remember if that DB is actually being used by another app." Margaret leaned against the board. "The 'Junk Drawer' effect. It happens to th...

Introducing: AWS Under Real Load

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  Introducing: AWS Under Real Load # aws # serverless # devops # cloud Production diagnostics for senior engineers. The Reality Most technical guides end where real engineering begins: the moment the "Happy Path" meets production traffic. They teach you how to configure a service and how to deploy it, but they rarely prepare you for what happens when that service meets sustained production load. You’ve checked the dashboards. Everything is green. But your users are reporting slowdowns, and the P99s are climbing. You need to know why a "healthy" system is failing—before the page goes off. To close that delta, we need a different approach. The Methodology At scale, systems don’t usually fail with a "crash"; they fail through degradation, tail latency, and resource contention. They fail under load.  AWS Under Real Load  is a new series dedicated to the senior engineer and the SRE. We aren't looking for configuration errors or IAM permission issues. We are...

AWS Under Real Load: Sudden P95 Latency Spikes Without Errors in Amazon S3

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  AWS Under Real Load: Sudden P95 Latency Spikes Without Errors in Amazon S3 # aws # s3 # devops # cloud A diagnostic guide to resolving high-percentile latency spikes in Amazon S3 under sustained production traffic. Problem An application operating at scale experiences sudden  P95 or P99 latency spikes  when interacting with Amazon S3. Typical symptoms: Average latency appears normal No S3 errors are reported No  SlowDown  responses No throttling alarms trigger Users report intermittent slowness Latency degradation occurs only during peak traffic Dashboards look green. Users disagree. Clarifying the Issue This is not an S3 outage. This is not an IAM issue. This is not a simple network failure. Under real load, S3 performance variance can emerge due to: Request concentration on specific key prefixes Sudden synchronized burst traffic Client-side connection pool exhaustion Retry amplification under load Per-prefix throughput limits being stressed S3 scales horizon...