Tagged “spotlight”
18 posts
Service spotlight: Amazon Cognito user pools vs identity pools
Amazon Cognito is two different services wearing one name — user pools for authentication, identity pools for AWS credentials — and the pricing tiers that trip teams up.
Service spotlight: Amazon Bedrock and its guardrails feature
What Bedrock buys you over calling a model provider directly, how the Guardrails feature filters content and PII, and where per-token pricing surprises show up.
Service spotlight: Amazon EventBridge beyond Lambda glue
What EventBridge actually buys you over SNS/SQS point-to-point wiring, how schema discovery and archive/replay work, and where rule limits bite.
Service spotlight: Amazon SQS queue depth, DLQs, and visibility
The SQS mistakes that show up in production — visibility timeout mismatches, DLQ redrive without a plan, and the alarms worth setting on day one.
Service spotlight: Aurora Serverless v2 without the v1 cold starts
How Aurora Serverless v2 scales capacity in fine-grained ACUs without pausing, where it still costs more than provisioned Aurora, and its real limits.
Service spotlight: AWS AppSync and its resolver-cost model
What managed GraphQL on AppSync buys over a hand-rolled Apollo server, how VTL and JS resolvers bill, and where subscriptions change your architecture.
Service spotlight: AWS Backup replaces per-service snapshot scripts
How AWS Backup centralizes EBS, RDS, DynamoDB, and EFS backup policy into one plan, and what it still leaves you to configure yourself.
Service spotlight: AWS Config for compliance-as-code and drift detection
How AWS Config records resource configuration history and evaluates it against rules continuously, and why it pairs with — not replaces — Terraform.
Service spotlight: AWS Fargate and its per-task pricing surprises
What you actually give up going serverless with Fargate over EC2-backed ECS, how per-task vCPU/memory billing adds up, and where Fargate Spot fits.
Service spotlight: AWS Step Functions for real workflows
When AWS Step Functions earns its keep over a pile of Lambda glue code, where its per-transition pricing bites, and a Map state trick worth knowing.
Service spotlight: CloudFront Functions vs Lambda@Edge
Picking between the two edge-compute options on CloudFront — runtime limits, latency, pricing, and which one actually fits a URL rewrite versus an origin call.
Service spotlight: querying years of audit history with CloudTrail Lake
How CloudTrail Lake lets you SQL-query months of API activity without standing up Athena and Glue yourself, and where its pricing model changes the calculus.
Service spotlight: Kinesis Data Streams, shards, and when SQS was simpler
What shards and fan-out actually buy you over SQS, where consumer scaling gets tricky, and the honest case for not reaching for Kinesis by default.
Service spotlight: cheap DNS-level failover with Route 53 health checks
How Route 53 health checks and failover routing build automatic DNS failover without a load balancer in front, and where DNS TTLs limit how fast it actually is.
Service spotlight: when S3 Intelligent-Tiering beats hand-rolled lifecycle rules
How Intelligent-Tiering automates storage-class transitions by access pattern, its monitoring fee, and when a plain lifecycle policy is still cheaper.
Service spotlight: wiring automatic rotation into Secrets Manager
How Secrets Manager rotation actually works end to end with the Lambda rotator pattern for RDS, and the failure modes that leave a secret half-rotated.
Service spotlight: SSH-less, bastion-less EC2 access with SSM
How Systems Manager Session Manager replaces bastion hosts and open SSH ports with IAM-authenticated, logged shell access, and where the agent still trips people up.
Service spotlight: running an AWS Well-Architected Tool review
What the Well-Architected Tool actually surfaces when you run a workload through it, where its generic questions fall short, and how to act on the output.