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 looking at "healthy" systems that are behaving poorly.

We stay disciplined, using a "Fix-It" cadence to ensure the information is actionable. We focus on:

  • The Tail: Analyzing P95 and P99 metrics where the real truth lives.
  • The Shape: Understanding that request patterns matter as much as request volume.
  • The Governance: Moving beyond "fixing bugs" to governing system behavior.

We focus on these pillars because in a distributed system, averages are a lie.

This series identifies the "physics" of individual AWS services—like S3, DynamoDB, or Lambda—and how they behave when pushed to their limits.

The First Entry

The inaugural deep-dive is live:

đź“Ś Sudden P95 Latency Spikes Without Errors in Amazon S3

We look at why S3 starts to "stretch" under concentrated load—specifically how partition key skew and retry amplification can degrade performance even when no throttling errors are present.

We provide a diagnostic path to reshape your traffic and reclaim your stability.

Measure the tail.
Shape the load.
Stabilize the system.

Welcome to AWS Under Real Load.

Aaron Rose is a software engineer and technology writer at tech-reader.blog and the author of Think Like a Genius.

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