It was my first on-call shift since I’ve been back after surgery. I was also onboarding a new person to be on-call, which is always a fun combo: you’re trying to look calm while quietly hoping nothing explodes. On Wednesday night I went to bed early, around 9pm, trying to catch up on sleep. Of course, my “favorite” sound came from the phone, the pager app. I really didn’t want to get up, so I did the lazy thing: checked which alarm fired through this terrible app we have to use, saw it wasn’t...

A couple weeks ago I wrote about making our reports take a couple seconds instead of 3 minutes. What I discovered later is that we didn’t actually have access to historical reports, because all the DynamoDB entries that pointed to the S3 data behind those reports had a TTL of one day. After asking around, the reason was simple: some partition keys were exceeding 10GB, and that’s the DynamoDB item collection limit per partition key (aka “all items with the same partition key”). So the...

My friend asked me yesterday if I know what AWS is. And it’s not someone I only talk to once in a while. We literally talk every day. I guess I always refer to my employer as just Amazon, so “AWS” never comes up. He recently acquired an app and needed to create a new AWS account, add a new user for his developer, and give him permissions for Lightsail (whatever that is). He managed to do the first two. The permissions part? Yep, he had no idea. I’ve written about IAM before here. My goal...