DynamoDB

At an AWS Road Show this fall, Darko Mesaros demoed a URL shortener he’d built in Rust called krtk.rs. Something about watching a clean, fast URL shortener just work stuck with me. I’ve built a few of these for demos since then, but I wanted to try something different this time: build one in Python with a retro 90s vibe, and let Kiro handle most of the heavy lifting. Kiro is one of AWS’s three frontier agents announced at re:Invent 2024—autonomous AI systems that maintain context and work independently for hours. While DevOps Agent handles incident response and Security Agent conducts penetration testing, Kiro is your AI developer that takes specifications and generates production-ready code. ...

On October 20, 2025, DNS resolution failed in AWS us-east-1, and with it, a lot of DynamoDB applications went down. Not because DynamoDB itself failed. The service was running. Data was there. Capacity was fine. But applications couldn’t reach it because DNS queries for dynamodb.us-east-1.amazonaws.com stopped resolving correctly. If you’ve ever wondered what happens when the infrastructure layer beneath your supposedly resilient database becomes unreachable—October 20 was the answer. And it wasn’t pretty. ...

Back in November, I was preparing for the Cracking the Cloud presentation at UNC Charlotte. I needed a way to explain how the cloud fundamentally changed what’s possible on the internet—not through abstract concepts, but through something students could immediately relate to. That’s when I remembered Thomas Game Docs. If you’ve never heard of her: she’s a YouTuber who makes incredibly well-produced video essays about video games. And she sometimes runs surveys asking her audience things like “Who’s the LEAST popular Pokémon?” or “Who’s the LEAST popular Animal Crossing villager?” ...

On the morning of October 20, AWS us-east-1 services were degraded—in particular, DNS services for DynamoDB. Most of us didn’t find out from monitoring alerts or dashboards. We found out because the apps on our phones stopped working. That’s the reality of modern infrastructure incidents: they often surface as user-facing failures long before the official root cause analysis lands in your inbox. I wrote about this outage for Ippon Technologies, focusing on three critical aspects that go beyond just understanding what broke: ...