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.”
Read MoreObserving 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.
Read MoreIdempotent 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.
Read MoreIAM 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.
Read MoreMoving 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.”
Read MoreHybrid 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.
Read MoreAWS Batch on EC2: a Deployment Checklist
This post is for teams running compute-heavy workloads on AWS Batch with EC2—genomics pipelines, media processing, ETL, simulations—not for “hello world” Fargate tutorials. It assumes you already have a container image, a VPC, and a reason to use Batch instead of ECS or Lambda.
Read MoreCloudWatch 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.
Read MoreTerraform 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.
Read MoreGitHub Actions to ECR to ECS: a Deployment Checklist
This post is for teams already running workloads on Amazon ECS who want a reliable GitHub Actions pipeline without reinventing the wheel each release. It is not a greenfield Kubernetes guide, and it assumes you have a working cluster, service, and task definition—not a blank AWS account.
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