Published 30 May 2026
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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Technical observations from building, operating and troubleshooting real cloud systems.
Published 29 May 2026
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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Published 26 May 2026
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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Published 25 May 2026
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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Published 23 May 2026
Improving my local development workflow
How Live Server and automatic code formatting improved the speed, structure and efficiency of building Cliffable locally.
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Published 23 May 2026
Building my first CI/CD pipeline
Moving from manual S3 uploads to a GitHub Actions deployment pipeline using OIDC, IAM roles and CloudFront invalidation.
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