Stories
6 stories from the trenches
How We Built a Production-Grade AWS Infrastructure from Scratch in 6 Weeks — as a Team of Two
“We were 14 months into building a B2B document intelligence platform for legal teams. Our entire infrastructure was a single $48/mo DigitalOcean VPS — one box, manually SSHed into,...”
Recovering from Terraform State Corruption 30 Minutes Before a Board Demo
“We provided a cloud infrastructure management platform. Our own infrastructure was managed by Terraform with state stored in an S3 backend with DynamoDB locking. We had a board dem...”
Building an On-Call Culture from Scratch at a "Move Fast, Break Things" Startup
“We were a 7-person engineering team at a seed-stage B2B SaaS startup. There was no on-call rotation — when things broke, the CTO would get a text from a customer and scramble to fi...”
How We Almost Lost Our Production Kubernetes Cluster to a Misconfigured CronJob
“We ran a 15-node Kubernetes cluster on GKE for our payment processing platform. The team was relatively new to Kubernetes — we had migrated from Heroku 6 months prior. We had basic...”
Migrating 200 Microservices from Jenkins to GitHub Actions in 3 Months
“Our platform team managed a Jenkins cluster running over 200 pipelines for our microservices. Jenkins was running on a fleet of 40 EC2 instances, costing us roughly $25k/month in c...”
The Black Friday Meltdown: How a Missing Index Took Down Our Checkout
“We were a mid-size e-commerce platform processing about 50k orders per day on normal days. Our stack was a Node.js monolith backed by PostgreSQL, deployed on AWS ECS. We had monito...”