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It started with a billing alert. Estimated charges had crossed $250. Not scary money, but enough to make me look. And what actually caught my attention wasn't the number, it was the alert itself. I'd clearly set this up at some point, and the threshold felt stale. So I went looking for where the alert lived. It came from a BillingAlerts CloudFormation stack I created back in 2014 and completely forgot about. So a thing I forgot about was warning me about all the other things I'd forgotten about. I opened my stack list and that's when I saw it wasn't alone. It was sitting in a lineup of stacks, and I didn't recognise half of them. Years of leftovers, just sitting there. The stuff you forget about doesn't break anything. It doesn't page you at 2am. It just sits there, quietly billing, until you glance at the invoice and can't remember what half of it is for. Forgotten, still-running resources are one of the biggest sources of wasted cloud spend, by some estimates around a quarter of the average cloud budget . I came to update one alert and I found a mess. To be clear, these stacks weren't really costing me much. Stopped instances, a few half-deleted leftovers. If they'd been the $252, the alert would've tripped every month. But that's the point. You can't tell what's actually costing you until the clutter is gone. So the alert could wait. I wanted these stale stacks gone first. Normally this is a chore. Open the console, find each stack, click delete, wait, refresh, check if it worked, OR write out CLI commands. It's not hard, just tedious. The kind of task I keep putting off. And that's exactly how this started. ClickOps through the console. I'd just finished deleting an old Directory Service directory over in the Mumbai region by hand, clicking through the screens and waiting out the spinner, when it hit me. Barely ten minutes of manual clicking, and I still had a pile of stacks to go. I didn't have to do any of this myself. Why was I still clicking? I opened Kiro ,

I wanted two things: short links under my own brand (every link I share points traffic back to my site ), and a real excuse to run a complete system on the edge — DNS, distributed compute, storage, auth and a dashboard — in production, at zero infrastructure cost. The result is flino.link : a shortener that responds in under 10 ms from 300+ locations, runs entirely on Cloudflare's free tier, and whose only expense is the domain: $4.68 a year. This post covers the design decisions, which is where the interesting parts are. The architecture in 30 seconds A single Cloudflare Worker serves the whole domain: GET /<slug> — the hot path. One read from Workers KV (globally replicated) and a 302 redirect. Nothing else touches that path. /api/links — a REST API with Bearer auth to create, list and delete links. /admin — a single-page dashboard served as inline HTML from the Worker itself. No framework, no build step. A Durable Object with embedded SQLite keeps per-slug click counts. No servers, no containers, no database to manage. The whole Worker is three TypeScript files and zero runtime dependencies. Why a dedicated domain? My first idea was to hang the shortener off a route on flino.dev . Bad idea: shorteners attract abuse — spam, phishing — and their domains sooner or later end up on blocklists. If that happens, I don't want it dragging my main domain down with it. A separate domain isolates that reputation risk completely, and a short .link costs less than a coffee per year. KV for links, a Durable Object for counters This is the central design decision. Workers KV is perfect for a shortener's access pattern — read-heavy, write-light, reads served from the edge — but its writes are eventually consistent : two concurrent increments in different datacenters would clobber each other. For counting clicks, it's useless. A Durable Object solves exactly that: it's a single global instance with transactional SQLite storage. Every increment, no matter which datacenter it comes

Introduction Serverless computing has become a buzzword in cloud architecture. But like any tool, it has sweet spots and sharp edges. After building and maintaining several serverless applications, I've learned where it shines and where it creates headaches. This article shares those lessons. When Serverless Helps 1. Event-Driven Workloads Serverless excels when your code runs in response to events: file uploads, database changes, HTTP requests. The pay-per-execution model means you don't pay for idle time. // AWS Lambda handler for image resizing exports . handler = async ( event ) => { const bucket = event . Records [ 0 ]. s3 . bucket . name ; const key = event . Records [ 0 ]. s3 . object . key ; // resize and save return { statusCode : 200 }; }; 2. Variable or Unpredictable Traffic If your app has occasional spikes (e.g., a marketing campaign), serverless auto-scales instantly. No need to provision for peak load. 3. Rapid Prototyping and MVPs You can deploy a fully functional API in minutes without managing servers. This accelerates feedback loops. 4. Microservices and Glue Code Serverless functions are perfect for small, single-purpose services that connect other services (e.g., processing webhooks, data transformation). When Serverless Hurts 1. Long-Running Processes Most providers have a maximum execution timeout (e.g., 15 minutes for AWS Lambda). Batch processing or video transcoding may hit this limit. # This will timeout if processing takes > 15 minutes def handler ( event , context ): process_large_file ( event [ ' file ' ]) return { ' done ' : True } 2. Cold Starts After a period of inactivity, the first request may have a delay of several seconds. This is detrimental for latency-sensitive applications like synchronous APIs. 3. Stateful Applications Serverless is stateless by design. If you need persistent connections (e.g., WebSockets) or local state, you'll need additional services like Redis or DynamoDB, adding complexity. 4. High, Steady Load If your

Google's cloud business is thriving, as companies adopting its AI and AI infrastructure services help the tech giant to report record profits.

SoundCloud has acquired decentralized music platform Nina Protocol, months after the startup announced it would shut down. The deal brings Nina’s artists, editorial archive, and music discovery tools to SoundCloud as the company continues expanding its platform for independent musicians.

Introduction: Strategic Entry into Cybersecurity The cybersecurity domain operates as a dynamically evolving ecosystem, characterized by the rapid emergence of specialized disciplines that outpace the ability of newcomers to systematically map them. From web security to cloud infrastructure, each subdomain demands a distinct integration of technical proficiency and strategic foresight. For entrants, this duality presents both opportunity and risk. While the diversity of career paths is expansive, it concurrently induces a decision paralysis —a condition where the proliferation of options dilutes focus and impedes progression. Consider the scenario of a novice equipped with foundational competencies in Linux, Python, and network fundamentals, now confronted with a spectrum of specializations: web security, binary exploitation, malware analysis, SOC operations, and cloud security. Each pathway entails a unique learning curve and industry relevance. The critical risk lies not in selecting an inherently "incorrect" path but in the suboptimal allocation of time within a field where technological obsolescence outpaces learning cycles. Cloud security exemplifies this dynamic. The transition to cloud-native architectures has introduced a critical stress point in cybersecurity frameworks. Traditional perimeter defenses, such as firewalls and VPNs, are increasingly inadequate for distributed systems. Misconfigurations in platforms like AWS or Azure—often stemming from human error or incomplete automation scripts —account for over 80% of cloud breaches (IBM Cloud Security Index, 2023). This is not a theoretical vulnerability but a causal mechanism : misconfiguration (internal process) → breach (impact) → data exfiltration (observable effect) . In contrast, niche domains like binary exploitation, while foundational for understanding low-level vulnerabilities, exhibit a diminishing practical application. Modern software increasingly leverages memory-safe languages (e.g., Rust, G

A configuration change in AWS's bill computation system showed customers estimated bills in the billions and trillions of dollars for over 24 hours. AWS's own alarms detected the anomalies but failed to halt bill generation or page engineers; customer escalations alerted the company 4.5 hours later. Budget and cost anomaly alerts were disabled platform-wide during mitigation. By Steef-Jan Wiggers

Google Cloud has published a new blueprint setting out how organisations should secure artificial intelligence workloads running on Google Kubernetes Engine, arguing that the shift from prototype to production has outpaced traditional security models. The document sets out a three layer approach covering infrastructure, model integrity and application security. By Matt Saunders

I shipped a Next.js 16 app on Cloudflare Workers via OpenNext. Not a demo. A real product with streaming chat, server components, D1 at the edge, and anonymous user sessions. Here is what broke, what barely worked, and what turned out to be surprisingly fine. The stack Next.js 16.2 (App Router) @opennextjs/cloudflare 1.19 D1 for SQLite at the edge Streaming chat via the AI binding (DeepSeek-V3 through a Workers proxy) React 19 Tailwind CSS 4 No auth wall, no OAuth, no database on the origin The site runs a few thousand sessions a week across ~30 persona pages, blog posts, guides, and learning content. Most pages are statically generated. The chat interaction is server-rendered components with streaming responses. What worked surprisingly well Static generation and ISR Pages, blogs, guides, persona pages — everything that does not need user-specific rendering — runs as static HTML at deploy time. Next.js 16 with generateStaticParams and fetch caching worked without modification. OpenNext handles the Cloudflare output format. The build step produces something Workers can serve. Revalidations are limited to Workers' cache API, but since most content changes at deploy time, I never hit that limit in production. The one caveat: revalidateTag() does not work the same way in a Workers runtime. Tags are Node.js memory constructs, and Workers are stateless. If you depend on tag-based revalidation for content updates, you need to either trigger deploys or accept stale-while-revalidate behavior from the CDN. D1 at the edge D1 was the least surprising part of the stack. SQL queries from Next.js route handlers feel like calling a regular database. Sessions store in D1, messages store in D1, and the latency is low enough that restoring a full chat thread from 30 messages takes under 200ms cold. The only sharp edge: D1 connections count against your Worker's concurrent request limit in development. With Next.js making its own fetch calls for compilation, I hit the D1 connection ce

Exam Guide: Developer - Associate Technologies And Concepts Cheat Sheet 📘 Cheat Sheet 1 | Services Compute Service What It Does Key Points Lambda Serverless Functions 15 min timeout, 10240 MB memory max, 1000 default concurrency EC2 Virtual Servers Instance profiles for IAM roles, user data for bootstrap ECS/Fargate Container Orchestration Task roles for IAM, Fargate = serverless containers Elastic Beanstalk PaaS Deployment .ebextensions for config, supports rolling/immutable/blue-green Storage & Databases Service What It Does Key Points DynamoDB NoSQL key-value Partition keys, GSI/LSI, query vs scan, DAX for caching S3 Object Storage SSE-S3/SSE-KMS/SSE-C, lifecycle policies, presigned URLs ElastiCache In-memory Cache Redis (complex types, persistence) vs Memcached (simple, multi-threaded) RDS Relational Database RDS Proxy for Lambda connection pooling, read replicas OpenSearch Search & Analytics Full-text search, log analytics API & Integration Service What It Does Key Points API Gateway REST/HTTP/WebSocket APIs Stages, authorizers, caching, request validation, throttling SQS Message Queue Standard (at-least-once) vs FIFO (exactly-once), visibility timeout, DLQ SNS Pub/sub messaging Fanout, filter policies, message attributes EventBridge Event Bus Pattern matching, content-based filtering, multiple targets Kinesis Real-time Streaming Shards, partition keys, parallelization factor Step Functions Workflow Orchestration Standard (long-running) vs Express (high-volume, short) Security Service What It Does Key Points IAM Access Management Policies, roles, least privilege, STS AssumeRole Cognito User Auth User Pools (tokens) vs Identity Pools (AWS credentials) KMS Key Management Envelope encryption, 4 KB limit, key rotation, cross-account Secrets Manager Secret Storage Auto-rotation, $0.40/secret/month SSM Parameter Store Config Storage Standard (free) vs Advanced , SecureString type ACM SSL/TLS Certificates Free public certs, auto-renewal, can't export CI/CD Service Wha

A practical roadmap for students who want to build real AWS skills, create an impressive portfolio, and prepare for cloud engineering careers. Introduction Every year, thousands of students begin learning AWS. They watch training videos, collect certificates, complete online courses, and share digital badges on social media. Yet when internship interviews or entry-level cloud engineering opportunities arrive, many struggle to answer a simple question: "What have you actually built on AWS?" The cloud industry rewards practical experience, not passive learning. AWS itself focuses beginner learning on hands-on experience with foundational services such as Amazon S3, Amazon EC2, Amazon VPC, Amazon RDS, and cloud security because these services power most real-world cloud environments. If you're a student aiming for a career in Cloud Engineering, DevOps, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), Solutions Architecture, or Platform Engineering, this article provides a practical roadmap that can help you become job-ready. Why Students Should Learn AWS Cloud computing has become the backbone of modern technology. Companies of every size use cloud platforms to: Host applications Store data Deploy AI workloads Build scalable systems Reduce infrastructure costs Improve reliability As a result, companies continue to hire professionals with cloud skills across software engineering, cybersecurity, DevOps, networking, and data engineering domains. AWS offers dedicated learning paths, hands-on labs, certification tracks, and career-focused programs specifically designed to help learners develop these skills. The key question is not: "Which AWS service should I memorize?" The better question is: "Can I design, deploy, secure, and troubleshoot cloud solutions?" The 5 AWS Projects Every Student Should Build Instead of completing another course, build these five projects. Project 1: Host a Static Website Using Amazon S3 What You'll Learn Cloud Storage Static Website Hosting Bucket Policies O

Look closely at what AWS, Microsoft, and Google shipped for AI agents this year and you notice something odd. Different names, different branding, and underneath, the exact same product. That convergence is convenient right up until you try to leave. Here's what they're all building and why it should make you a little cautious. What all three are actually building Strip away the marketing and the three big clouds are assembling the same five-part stack for running enterprise AI agents: a managed runtime to execute the agent, memory so it remembers context, identity so it can authenticate and be governed, tools so it can call your systems, and observability so you can see what it did. The products are AWS Bedrock AgentCore, Microsoft's Azure AI Foundry with its Agent365 control plane, and Google's Vertex AI agent stack. They look different on the pricing page. Architecturally, they're the same idea built three times. This isn't a coincidence. When you're solving the same problem, running agents safely inside an enterprise, you land on the same pieces. The market basically agreed on the shape of an agent platform in early 2026, and each hyperscaler raced to own it on their own cloud. Why the convergence feels great at first If your data and identity already live in one cloud, that cloud's agent runtime is the fastest path to production. Your storage is there, your identity system is there, your logging is there. The platform snaps into all of it. You get governance, audit trails, and deployment almost for free. For a team that just wants agents running with proper controls, that's a real gift. I get the appeal. The catch nobody puts on the slide Here's the trap. When your agent's runtime, credentials, state, and telemetry all live inside one cloud, moving it somewhere else isn't a config change. It's a rebuild. Take AWS Bedrock AgentCore. An agent built on it is wired to AWS identity, networking, and storage. Picking it up and moving it to Azure or Google isn't a matt

OpenAI just bought a cloud company, and if you only read the headline you'd miss the point. This deal tells you exactly where AI coding is heading: out of your editor and into the cloud. Here's what happened and why it matters. What OpenAI actually bought On June 11, 2026, OpenAI announced it's acquiring Ona, a German startup you might know by its old name, Gitpod. Terms weren't disclosed, and the deal still needs regulatory approval before it closes. Ona builds secure cloud environments where code can run. That's the whole reason OpenAI wanted it. Its Codex coding agent has grown fast, now past 5 million weekly active users, up from 3 million in April, and the jobs those agents run have gotten much longer. Tasks that used to take a few minutes now stretch into hours, sometimes days. An agent that works for hours can't live on your laptop. Close the lid and it dies. It needs a persistent place in the cloud to keep running. That's what Ona gives Codex, and notably, Ona's platform can run inside a customer's own cloud, which matters for enterprises that won't send code elsewhere. Ona's enterprise usage reportedly grew 13-fold this year, with clients like major banks and pharma companies. Why this is a bigger deal than it looks For years, AI coding meant an assistant inside your editor. Autocomplete, a chat panel, quick edits. The editor was the product. That era is ending. When agents run for hours on their own, the important question isn't "how good is the autocomplete." It's "where does the agent run, and for how long." The battleground is shifting from the editor to persistent cloud execution, and OpenAI just bought its way into that fight. The wider war OpenAI isn't alone in this move, which is why it feels like a real war now. Cursor already added cloud agents that run tasks without tying up your machine. Devin, from Cognition, was built cloud-first as an autonomous engineer from day one. Anthropic's Claude Code runs long, multi-step jobs and connects into your t

Something happened in 2026 that should be on every engineer's radar, especially if you work in finance, healthcare, government, or anywhere regulated. The US government labeled an American AI company a national security supply-chain risk. That had never happened before. Whatever you think of the politics, the professional lesson underneath it is big, so let me walk through it plainly. What actually happened The Department of Defense terminated a contract with Anthropic worth an estimated $200 million. The breakdown wasn't about price or performance. It was about how the military could use the AI. Anthropic's CEO, Dario Amodei, objected to a clause that allowed the military "any lawful use" of the model. Anthropic wanted the contract to explicitly rule out things like domestic mass surveillance and autonomous weapons, and refused to sign without those limits. The government wanted fewer restrictions. When talks broke down, the Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, formally designated Anthropic a "Supply-Chain Risk to National Security." That label is normally reserved for foreign adversaries and hostile telecom vendors, think of how the US treated Huawei. This was the first time it had ever been applied to an American company, and reportedly the first time it was used because a company wouldn't agree to certain contract terms. OpenAI then stepped in to take the Pentagon work Anthropic had walked away from. There's a legal coda worth noting for accuracy. In March 2026, a federal judge granted a preliminary injunction against the government, writing that the designation looked like retaliation for Anthropic drawing public scrutiny, which she framed as a First Amendment problem. So the label is being contested in court, not settled fact. Why this matters beyond the headlines Strip away the politics and this is a case study in something every regulated team deals with: what happens when your AI vendor's policies collide with your requirements. Anthropic drew a hard line on use

Measured 2026-07-21 on vllm/vllm-tpu:nightly (vLLM 0.23.1rc1.dev1076), a GCE flex-start ct6e-standard-1t (one TPU v6e chip, 32 GB HBM) in europe-west4-a. TL;DR The plain google/gemma-4-E2B-it serves well on one v6e chip; none of its QAT siblings load at all. The 2-billion-parameter "efficient" Gemma 4 sustains 213 tok/s for a single user with a 16 ms first token, scales to ~2,200 output tok/s across concurrent streams, handles OpenAI-style function calling — including parallel calls and refusal to hallucinate calls — without a miss, and answers simple vision questions accurately in ~200 ms. The QAT variants are a different story: the int4 compressed-tensors export hits an unimplemented quantization path, and the bf16 QAT export trips a loader bug — the Gemma 4 implementation demands per-layer norms that E2B's KV-sharing architecture legitimately doesn't have. Filed upstream as tpu-inference #3225 . One capability coupling to know about: with a reasoning parser configured, schema enforcement only engages when thinking is enabled — thinking-off requests sail through unconstrained with a 200 status. Config interaction, not TPU limitation; details below. 1. Getting to a serving endpoint The host is a GCE flex-start VM — capacity granted on request, billed until deleted, hard-stopped at a 4-hour max run, $1.35/chip-hour. A startup script installs Docker, pulls vllm/vllm-tpu:nightly , fetches the Hugging Face token from Secret Manager via the metadata server, and launches vLLM. Boot timeline: VM RUNNING at t+0 (200 GB boot disk — the 10 GB default cannot hold the vLLM image) → Docker installed ~t+1:00 → image pulled ~t+6:00 → weights downloaded, XLA compiled, health green ~t+8:30. Two environment quirks worth knowing: Direct SSH silently times out on some networks even when the VPC allows tcp:22 — the block is upstream of the VPC. IAP tunneling ( gcloud compute ssh --tunnel-through-iap ) rides over HTTPS and works; so does tunneling the API port with gcloud compute start-

Why Your WeChat Mini-Program Work Is Actually Relevant US data engineering interviews prioritize hands-on experience with data pipelines, SQL, and scalable storage. WeChat mini-programs, though often seen as front-end tools, generate and process substantial backend data. If you designed the logic behind user actions, session management, or real-time updates, you already have transferable skills. The key is to stop describing the mini-program as a "feature" and start describing it as a "data system." Recruiters don't care about WeChat's UI components; they care about how you moved, transformed, and stored data. The Core Translation: From Mini-Program to Data Engineering When rewriting your resume, map each mini-program task to a standard data engineering function: User interaction logic → Event-driven data pipeline (e.g., Kafka, AWS Kinesis, or custom queues) WeChat cloud functions → Serverless compute (e.g., AWS Lambda, Azure Functions) Database reads/writes via WeChat API → NoSQL or relational database operations (e.g., MongoDB, MySQL, DynamoDB) Session tracking or analytics → ETL pipeline extracting user behavior data into a warehouse Do not use WeChat-specific terms like "wx.request" or "Mini Program SDK" without explaining the data they handled. Replace them with equivalent English terms. A Quick Side-by-Side Translation Table WeChat Term US Data Engineering Equivalent WeChat Cloud Database Managed NoSQL database (like MongoDB Atlas) Mini Program Backend with Cloud Functions Serverless data processing (AWS Lambda) User login & session management Authentication pipeline with token storage Real-time message push Event-driven notification system Reshaping Your Bullet Points: Before and After Generic bullet points kill your chances. Here is a concrete rewrite that turns a typical WeChat mini-program description into a data engineering achievement. Before (Chinese-English hybrid, vague): "Developed a WeChat mini-program for e-commerce with 50k users. Used wx.request

DoorDash has developed Entity Cache, a transparent proxy caching platform built on Envoy and Valkey to reduce redundant service-to-service requests across its microservices architecture. Operating within DoorDash’s service mesh, the platform serves over 1.5M requests per second with 99.99999% availability through caching, event-driven invalidation, failure handling, and performance optimizations. By Leela Kumili

AWS released Loom, an open-source reference platform on AWS Labs for governing AI agents at scale. Built on Strands Agents and Bedrock AgentCore Runtime, it implements RFC 8693 token exchange for identity propagation through delegated actor chains, config-driven deployments without runtime code generation, and mandatory tagging. AWS positions it as an example, not a managed service. By Steef-Jan Wiggers

Introduction At recent technology conferences, one topic has caught my attention: every year, more health-focused devices, sensors, and applications appear. Smartwatches track heart rate, smart scales measure body data, glucose monitors record blood sugar levels, and apps help users track sleep or nutrition. Today, the amount of information we can collect about our own bodies is enormous. This article was inspired by an everyday experience with my father, Herminio ❤️ . Whenever he has a medical appointment, he opens the Apple Health app and shows the doctor the evolution of his heart rate, physical activity, sleep hours, and other recorded metrics. While watching this, I kept asking myself the same question: are we really making the most of all this information? Showing a chart during a medical appointment can be useful, but the data could provide much more value if it were automatically processed, summarized, and transformed into a structured health report. For this reason in this project, I use Gemini to transform previously calculated metrics into a clear and organized summary. The LLM does not analyze all the raw records or perform the main calculations. The pipeline processes the data, calculates the indicators, and generates the visualizations, while the model acts as a support layer for building the report narrative. The goal is not to create a medical application or replace professional judgment. Instead, the purpose is to build a prototype that shows how Apple Health exports, deterministic data processing, visualizations, and an LLM can be combined to generate automated reports. This project was developed using simulated data from three patients, so the complete pipeline can be reproduced without using real clinical information. ✨ Why Gemini? This project uses an LLM to transform previously processed metrics into a structured narrative that can be reviewed more easily by a healthcare professional. I chose Gemini for practical reasons: 〰️ I was already famil

Some commands you can walk back. Terminating an EC2 instance is not one of them. Day 14 paired a recoverable problem, a web server knocked over by a rogue process, with an unrecoverable one, deleting a server on purpose, and the contrast is the whole lesson. One Linux task, one AWS task. Track down the process blocking Apache and restore the service, then terminate an EC2 instance and confirm it is gone. The tasks come from the KodeKloud Engineer platform. httpd: diagnose in order, then restore When httpd will not start, resist the urge to guess. Work in order. Start with what the service itself reports: # What does httpd think is wrong systemctl status httpd systemctl start httpd The status output usually names the problem, and a failed bind on the port is the classic one. Before assuming a rogue process, check that httpd's own config is sane, because a wrong port or hostname produces the same "won't start" symptom: # Check the configured listen port and server name grep -i listen /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf vi /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf # Fix the ServerName directive if it is wrong: ServerName hostname:<port> If the config is fine and the port is genuinely taken, then you go hunting for the process holding it: # Find the PID on the conflicting port sudo su - yum install -y net-tools netstat -tulpn # Clear it, then bring httpd back kill -9 <PID> systemctl enable httpd systemctl start httpd systemctl status httpd kill -9 is SIGKILL, the instant, no-cleanup kill. It is the right tool when a process is wedged and ignoring a polite request, but as a default habit, it is worth trying a plain kill first. The order that matters here is diagnostic: config before process, gentle signal before forceful one. Rushing to kill -9 at the first sign of trouble is how you mask the real cause instead of fixing it. Terminating EC2: the command with no undo Day 9 was about protecting an instance from termination. Day 14 is the other side of that lever, actually terminating one, on purp