Guides
Practical guides on platform, cost, and reliability decisions, each backed by a case study.
OpenSearch vs PostgreSQL for application search: when Postgres is enough
Search engines earn their complexity at web scale. Below it, a well-indexed Postgres often wins on latency, cost, and operations. How to tell which side of the line you are on, and how to prove it with replayed production queries.
Preview environments per pull request on Kubernetes: what is actually hard
Creating an environment per pull request is a week of work. Living with fifty of them is the project. The options, the database problem, lifecycle and cleanup, and what we would do again after 1,470 deploys.
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.
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.
Why your website goes down when marketing sends an email
Corporate mail scanners prefetch every link the moment a campaign lands, and thousands of HEAD requests reach your origin in seconds. How to confirm it from the logs and fix it in layers, from the web server to the WAF.