Engineering Notes

Technical observations from building, operating and troubleshooting real cloud systems.

AWS budget preview showing multiple cost alert thresholds

Published 24 June 2026

AWS • FinOps • IAM

AWS Cost Protection Strategy

How a billing audit led to a layered AWS cost protection strategy using budget alerts, monthly reviews, region restrictions and IAM guardrails to reduce the risk of unexpected charges.

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Before and after comparison of a WordPress infrastructure review

Published 12 June 2026

WordPress • AWS Lightsail • Infrastructure

A WordPress Infrastructure Review

A security alert prompted a wider review of my WordPress infrastructure, leading to improvements across server configuration, domain management, DNS architecture and operational security.

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AWS Lightsail CPU overview showing a spike before the instance upgrade

Published 30 May 2026

AWS • Capacity • Operations

When a 1GB Instance Wasn't Enough

A production outage revealed how little headroom remained on a 1 GB Lightsail instance, leading to a deeper look at capacity planning, memory pressure and the decision to upgrade.

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AWS Lightsail CPU utilization alarm triggered during a production outage investigation

Published 29 May 2026

AWS • Monitoring • Operations

The Night Monitoring Paid For Itself

How monitoring and alerting detected a real production outage and helped trace the root cause to memory exhaustion, migration PHP settings and a stale plugin reference.

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CloudWatch alarm email notification showing a website down alert

Published 26 May 2026

AWS • Monitoring • Operations

From silent failures to automated alerting

How intermittent WordPress outages after a Lightsail migration led to swap configuration, Route 53 health checks, CloudWatch alarms and SNS email notifications for automated failure detection.

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AWS Lightsail backup and recovery architecture diagram

Published 25 May 2026

AWS • Operations • Backups

Rethinking backups after a failed restore

How a failed WordPress restore test exposed weaknesses in my backup strategy and led to a simpler, recovery-first approach using AWS Lightsail snapshots, Lambda automation and monitoring.

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