Blog
Mert Özen's blog posts on software development, backend, frontend, and DevOps.
Real Incidents 2: Automation, Hidden Dependencies and Recovery Paths — AWS 2025, Facebook 2021, GitLab 2017, Knight Capital 2012
In the AWS, Facebook, GitLab and Knight Capital cases the outage grew because of automation's own failures, hidden dependencies and recovery paths that depended on what broke; the lesson is to rehearse the recovery path too. We tell the four cases from official sources, run a restore drill on Bookstore's SQL Server whose first run comes out red, prepare a dependency map and break-glass access, and write an alert that catches mixed versions.
Sound Architecture in the Cloud: the Well-Architected Framework, Backup and DR, Lock-in and IaC as the Next Step
Sound architecture in the cloud means asking a workload the five Well-Architected pillars regularly, turning RPO and RTO into written targets and testing backups by restoring them. We review Bookstore against the five pillars and cover what zone redundancy and failover groups do and don't save, a real restore drill, a conscious approach to lock-in, landing zones, the move to IaC and the end-of-series checklist.