Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Imagine you want to launch an application without first building and managing the servers that run it. You write the code, pick how it should run, and then let a platform take care of the rest. That’s the core promise of AWS Elastic Beanstalk. In this snackable guide, you’ll understand AWS Elastic Beanstalk well enough to decide if it belongs in your AWS architecture.

During the October 20th AWS outage, not one Control Plane customer went down. Here’s the architecture that made that possible, and how to assess your own.

The modern world runs on mission-critical software. It moves our money, drives our cars, diagnoses our illnesses, and fundamentally improves our lives. But, organizations building this critical software face a paradox: they need to move fast to stay competitive, but they also need rigorous governance to manage risk. This has created a lot of tension in regulated industries.

"I wish I knew about this a couple years ago..." Over my seven years as a cofounder, I've heard some version of that line more than any other. Usually, it comes at the end of a demo to someone who has spent a year getting to something not even close to what they're seeing on my screen. The story is always the same. An organization adopts Kubernetes and arrives at the inevitable conclusion that they need a platform.

A few months ago I wrote about BygoneSSL and the 1.5 million domains with valid certificates owned by someone else. Domains change hands but certificates don’t know. The old owner keeps their private key, and the certificate keeps working. It’s an industry problem, but it turns out it’s our problem too. We purchased certkit.dev for internal development and demos.

IP address exhaustion in Kubernetes doesn’t announce itself with clear error messages. Pods fail to schedule, services degrade unpredictably, and the symptoms look like a dozen different problems before anyone realizes the cluster has run out of available IP addresses. By the time the root cause becomes clear, multiple services are affected and recovery requires coordination across infrastructure layers.

In regulated industries like fintech, healthcare, and government, DevOps teams often find themselves acting as human compliance gateways. The pressure to maintain strict security standards while accelerating release cycles creates a compliance tax: a heavy burden of manual environment setups, security review tickets, and the inevitable scramble for evidence before an audit. This manual labor, or toil, is more than a drain on productivity. It creates a dangerous gap between policy and actual operations.