Crew Finance, part two: one VPC, an isolated cardholder environment, and an 89% NAT bill cut
Five VPCs on the same address range became one shared network with an isolated PCI zone, while NAT costs dropped 89% and load balancer costs halved.
Deric Abel
ECS vs EKS: when moving is worth it, and what it actually saves
ECS cannot bin-pack, and that is the whole cost argument. Here is how to tell from two weeks of utilization data whether a migration would pay, what it costs you in operations, and the order to move things in.
Pull request environments engineers run themselves: a chart, an operator, and a dashboard
Over 1,470 pull request environments deployed since February across 13 repositories, a median six minutes from push to URL, with dev stacks and AI prototyping sandboxes running on the same operator and dashboard and no platform ticket to see, restart, or tear one down.
Why ECS could not pack and what moving to EKS did to compute costs
On ECS the fleet reserved 57 vCPU and used one. On EKS with Karpenter, spot by default, and measured requests, twenty packed nodes deliver over ten times the work per compute dollar, and the observability, registry, CI, and AI tooling rode along on the spare capacity.
Cutting an AWS bill without touching production: a checklist for small teams
NAT gateways, one load balancer per environment, security tooling on default settings, premium storage tiers, and networks you accumulated rather than designed. The seven line items that account for most of a small team's overspend.
Zero-downtime website cutover: the checklist we use
A site relaunch does not need a fifteen-minute outage window. Load test from real traffic, canary on real users, rehearse the switch, and keep rollback to one step. The checklist that got a national news site cut over in under thirty seconds.
Migrating a national news site to a headless CMS with a 30-second cutover
A flagship media site moved off a decade-old in-house CMS onto Storyblok with launch day as the cutover. A load test built from real traffic, a canary on the existing CDN, and a rehearsed switch turned a five-to-fifteen-minute outage estimate into under 30 seconds.