The 3 AM pager alert. Slack channels exploding. A single, dreaded message cascades through the organization: “We’re seeing issues with us-east-1.” It’s the outage that every seasoned engineer knows is not a matter of if, but when. I’ve walked into companies where their entire multi-million dollar operation was pinned to a single AWS availability zone,…
I’ve walked into more than one “secure” startup only to find their crown jewels—the production database—exposed to the world with a publicly_accessible = true flag. The engineers usually give me the same line: “Don’t worry, the security group is locked down to our office IP.” That’s not security; it’s a landmine waiting for one compromised…
The command is burned into the memory of every cloud engineer: ssh -i key.pem [email protected]. It’s the classic digital key to the kingdom—the bastion host sitting in a public subnet, bravely facing the internet with port 22 open. I’ve walked into countless environments where this was the standard operating procedure. And every single time, it’s…
I’ve seen it happen more times than I can count. I’ll walk into an organization using Azure, and the subscription looks like a digital Wild West. Every developer, contractor, and their dog has the Contributor role assigned at the subscription scope. Then comes the inevitable horror story: a simple script meant to clean up a…
I’ve walked into more than one new consulting gig to find the AWS account is a minefield of over-permissioned IAM users. It usually starts with a familiar, stomach-dropping story. A junior engineer, armed with PowerUserAccess, tries to terminate a test instance and accidentally nukes a production database because of a typo in a script. Or…