When outside help with Terraform, Kubernetes or CI/CD is worth it for a small team
When a small SaaS team should pay for outside DevOps help, and when it is a waste. Plain advice from working on AWS with teams under 50 people.
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Notes from running AWS for small SaaS teams
Short, practical write-ups from real engagements: what went wrong, what it cost, and what to check on your own account.
Who actually receives your AWS alerts? How to fix alerts nobody reads
AWS alerts sent to a former employee's inbox or buried in a muted Slack channel protect nobody. Check where yours go and how to cut the noise.
Read articleWhy an untested database backup is not a backup
Fourteen months of green snapshots, and a restore that took four hours instead of 45 minutes. Why you should test your RDS restore every quarter.
Read articleHow to set up AWS Budgets alerts before you get a surprise bill
Most AWS accounts have no budget alerts set up. How to check yours, set up AWS Budgets and Cost Anomaly Detection, and catch a bad month early.
Read articleThe AWS NAT Gateway cost most founders never see on their bill
A NAT Gateway can quietly cost more than the servers behind it. How I found one on a client's AWS bill and cut its cost by about 85%.
Read articleCompute Savings Plans vs EC2 Instance Savings Plans vs Reserved Instances
Which AWS commitment fits a small SaaS: Compute Savings Plans, EC2 Instance Savings Plans or Reserved Instances, and how much to commit.
Read articleWhy your AWS bill includes servers and disks nobody uses
Idle staging environments and forgotten volumes, IPs and snapshots quietly inflate AWS bills. How to find them with the CLI and keep them from coming back.
Read articleDoes your old agency still have access to your AWS account?
Former agencies and contractors often keep admin access to AWS long after the contract ends. How to audit IAM users, keys and roles and remove them safely.
Read articleWant this level of ownership on your AWS?
The audit is free and the findings are yours to keep. If an ongoing arrangement makes sense after that, the tiers are published.