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Stories

3 stories from the trenches

🏗️ System Design

How We Built a Production-Grade AWS Infrastructure from Scratch in 6 Weeks — as a Team of Two

👤 Swift-Timber-19a Early-stage startup SaaS2026

“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,...”

AWSTerraformGitHub ActionsDocker+4
😰 Near-Miss

How We Almost Lost Our Production Kubernetes Cluster to a Misconfigured CronJob

👤 @k8s_newbie_kimfintech2024

“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...”

KubernetesGCPPrometheusGrafana+2
⚡ Incident Report

The Black Friday Meltdown: How a Missing Index Took Down Our Checkout

👤 @sre_sarahe-commerce2024

“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...”

PostgreSQLAWSDatadogIncident Response+1