Shameem Abdul Salam | Platform & DevOps Engineer

Hybrid Lab-to-Cloud: a Go-Live and Recovery Checklist

The pilot worked for one instrument on a quiet Tuesday. Cutover week added three instruments, a VPN blip, and a KMS key rotation—and the only recovery plan was “call the person who built the agent.”

Observing and Debugging Hybrid Data Transfers

Slack said “files aren’t in S3.” The agent host said “fine.” CloudWatch had three log groups and no shared id. Twenty minutes later someone found the run under a different instrument prefix—and a completion marker that never wrote.

Idempotent Pollers, Retries, and Quarantine Paths

The agent crashed after uploading 40 of 42 files. On restart it uploaded everything again, overwrote nothing useful, emitted two completion markers, and the pipeline ran twice—once on a partial set that somehow got marked ready during the race.

IAM and KMS Across the Hybrid Lab–Cloud Boundary

Transfer logs said AccessDenied. The bucket policy “allowed S3.” Someone added s3:* on the role and it still failed—because the objects used SSE-KMS and the key policy never trusted the transfer identity.

Moving Instrument Data to S3 Reliably

The object existed in S3. Size looked right. Downstream parsing failed because the transfer cut off mid-write and a later retry never ran—or ran into a different key. Metrics said “uploaded.” Science said “garbage.”

Hybrid Lab-to-Cloud: Map the Data Path Before Building It

The transfer agent was “done.” S3 had objects. Downstream Batch jobs still saw empty prefixes for hours. Nobody could say whether the instrument was late, the poller was stuck, or a completion marker never arrived.

CloudWatch Logs Insights: 8 Queries I Reuse in Production

This post is for teams already shipping workloads to AWS who reach for the CloudWatch console when something breaks—but re-type the same Logs Insights query from memory every time. It is not a replacement for APM or full distributed tracing, and it assumes your apps write structured or semi-structured logs to CloudWatch.

Terraform Module Layout I Use for Multi-Environment AWS

This post is for teams already running Terraform in AWS who have felt the pain of three “similar but not quite the same” environment folders. It is not a Terraform 101 tutorial, and it assumes you know what a module, variable, and remote state backend are.