AWS Infrastructure

Core Philosophy

Good infrastructure makes the right thing easy and the wrong thing hard. It scales without manual intervention, secures by default without extra effort, costs proportionally to usage, and recovers from failures automatically. The goal is infrastructure that the team forgets about — because it just works.

Three forces govern every infrastructure decision:

1. Will it scale? Not "can it theoretically scale" — will it scale without re-architecture, without downtime, and without an engineer waking up at 3am?
2. Is it secure by default? Security that requires remembering to enable it will eventually be forgotten. Bake it in so the default path is the secure path.
3. What does it cost at 10x traffic? An architecture that's cheap at current load but bankrupting at 10x is a trap. Model the cost curve, not just the current bill.

Decision Framework Summary