Insights & Resources

The AWS observability team built a chaos engineering game on top of the official OTel Demo. 44 injected failures. Three signals. One LLM judge. Here's everything inside it.

Kinesis Data Streams combined with Lambda and DynamoDB is the simplest path to a real-time data pipeline on AWS. Here is the complete architecture, code patterns, and operational guidance.

EMR Serverless vs EC2 vs EKS for Spark. July 2026 refresh — Spot limits, cold start, Iceberg on all three, and a decision matrix for intermittent vs 24/7 jobs.

Glue 5.1 (Spark 3.5.6, Iceberg 1.10.0) for lakehouse ETL. July 2026 refresh — Iceberg v2 vs v3, Lake Formation writes, compaction, Athena compatibility.

Most DevOps guides teach what AWS services are. Production teaches what happens when 200 engineers use them together. Here's the gap.

AWS CLI v2 #10196 chmod'd streaming outputs to 0600 — including /dev/null. July 2026 retrospective: #10215 revert, host repair, pin-and-canary checklist.

Glue does EL; dbt does T. July 2026 refresh — Glue 5.1 DPU economics, dbt-athena/Redshift, and the combined stack most teams converge on.

LocalStack paid tiers pushed free emulators forward. July 2026: MiniStack (~60+ services, real Postgres/Redis) vs floci (ms startup) — pick by CI speed vs DB fidelity.

12 business triggers for hiring AWS help — and when not to. July 2026 scorecard: FinOps, GenAI, compliance, multi-account.

Athena still bills ~$5/TB scanned (or Capacity Reservations by DPU). July 2026 refresh — partitions, Parquet/Iceberg, workgroups, and when provisioned capacity wins.

The standard cost optimization checklist no longer cuts it. These 8 modern strategies — from unit economics to automated Savings Plans and cost observability — reflect how engineering teams are actually managing cloud spend in 2026.

Most AWS security breaches aren't caused by AWS failures — they're caused by misconfiguration. Here are 10 concrete best practices to harden your AWS environment in 2026.