Hi! Today an interesting practical “journey” related to network performance and AWS limitations is shared. It all started with a growing Symfony application running on a Docker Swarm cluster. The setup used powerful EC2 instances for the application layer and a Managed Valkey (Redis) cluster for caching and sessions. Everything seemed fine until traffic began to scale. Suddenly, strange...
I’ve just published a practical 2-page AI defense mini-framework for engineering teams. Instead of one long wall of text, I split the content into: 1) Learning page (theory-first, fast reading) Explains each defense concept clearly: why it matters, what it means in real operations, and where teams usually fail. Uses expandable sections (accordions) for deeper detail without...
The contemporary digital landscape is defined by an escalating arms race between application developers and automated threat actors. As business-critical applications become increasingly open to the global internet, the risk of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks, particularly at the HTTP application layer, has shifted from a rare possibility to an inevitability. While infrastructure...
If you have ever tried to stop a sophisticated scraper or a DDoS attack using standard AWS WAF rate limits, you likely ran into the wall with bigboard: IP rotation. Traditionally, rate-based rules are simple. The WAF counts requests from a specific key (usually an IP address) in a rolling 5-minute window. If that IP crosses a threshold, the WAF blocks it. This works great for sloppy scripts. But...
Udemy Coupon: DEVSECOPSAPRIL – active 01.04.2026-01.05.2026; in case coupons are already expired, please check that page regularly – new one will appear soon ENROLL AT LLM Bot Protection course Hi, I am glad to represent my new course: “DevSecOps on AWS: Defend Against LLM Scrapers & Bot Traffic”. Below is the course promo description. Something very unusual happened in July 2025...
During the last two weeks, something weird started happening on one of the RDS instances I’m responsible for. Sudden, sharp peaks in active connections appeared — dozens of new ones almost instantly, then slowly disappearing. Within 5–10 minutes, the application would hang and become unresponsive. This wasn’t just a minor blip; it was a full-blown mystery. Phase 1: The Code Witch Hunt The...
Working with AWS logs often feels like drinking from a firehose.WAF, ALB, CloudFront – they all happily generate hundreds of gigabytes of logs. The bigger your workloads grow, the more painful it becomes: queries run for ages, Athena bills keep climbing, and dashboards lag. But here’s the thing: in 90% of cases, you don’t actually need all of the logs. You want a specific day, maybe a week...
Hi, Recently I decided to finally sort out Linux antivirus options for my personal laptop. What started as a quick weekend test of ClamAV turned into a full-blown adventure through GUI glitches, kernel modules, hanging processes, trial versions, and… a realization that I was relying a bit too much on ChatGPT. 🙃 Here’s my full journey, lessons learned, screenshots, and configs — and how I...
Hey everyone, We’re living in truly remarkable times. The twin forces of deglobalization and rapid AI advancement are reshaping our world in ways we can barely keep up with. Unfortunately — at least from my perspective — the impact on cybersecurity feels more negative than positive. The number of cyberattacks I’ve personally seen this year has doubled, maybe even tripled, compared to last. And...
Hi, DevOps fans Here’s a short but practical article on how to set up a maintenance page in AWS using CloudFront, ALB, and Terraform. I’ll assume you already know your way around Terraform, and understand the basics of Application Load Balancer and CloudFront. So let’s skip the “what is ALB” and dive into the real stuff! Also known as a “Service Works Page” or “Downtime Page”, a maintenance page...