Resilience

AWS & Cloud

Scaling Resilience with AWS Resilience Hub: A Multi-Account Reality Check

Everyone in financial services talks about resilience. We have DR plans, architecture diagrams, dashboards, and increasingly, tools like AWS Resilience Hub. On paper, it all looks good. In practice, most resilience programs don’t fail because of missing tooling — they fail because they never move beyond isolated assessments. A team runs a Resilience Hub assessment. They get a score. Maybe they even fix a few findings. And then nothing happens. No aggregation. No cadence. No program. Just a snapshot that lives in one account, attached to one application, reviewed once. ...

AWS & Cloud

What October 20 Taught Me About DynamoDB (and What It Didn't)

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. ...

Talks & Community

Data Pour with Nimish Donde: Resiliency, Data Gravity, and Building Cloud Platforms That Scale

For this episode of Data Pour, I sat down with Nimish Donde—Head of Cloud Platform and Security Engineering at Truist—at Amélie’s French bakery in Charlotte. It’s a place that’s been part of the city’s fabric since 2008, growing from a single 24-hour location in NoDa (that I used to frequent during college) to four locations across Charlotte. Like this bakery, Charlotte’s tech scene has grown and evolved—and Nimish has been part of that transformation for the past 16 years. ...

AWS & Cloud

Learning from the October 20 AWS Outage: Questions Every Team Should Ask

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: ...