Week #28: Infra Insights: Weekly Wrap-Up

Infrastructure doesn’t have to be complex to be powerful. Last week, we took meaningful steps to help our clients handle growth more gracefully.

For a high-traffic e-commerce platform, we boosted autoscaling capacity, increasing the web application’s upper limit from 20 to 50 instances. This wasn’t just about throwing more compute at the problem – it’s part of our strategy to absorb traffic spikes seamlessly, especially during marketing surges. Meanwhile, in another environment, a Redis cache node struggling under memory pressure was upsized to eliminate latency in background job processing. These proactive changes keep user experiences smooth even under stress.

Keeping Kubernetes clusters current is equally critical. We validated an upgrade of a client’s Amazon EKS cluster to version 1.31, paving the way for improved performance and security hardening. At the same time, we cleaned up outdated staging environments to reduce complexity and cloud spend, making sure our clients are running lean, not bloated.

Great monitoring isn’t just about flashy dashboards – it’s about building observability into the fabric of deployments.

Our team shipped enhancements to our Terraform-based Grafana monitoring stack module, continuing the "observability as code" approach. This lets us spin up standardized dashboards and alerts automatically whenever a new service goes live. Developers get instant visibility, and operations teams sleep better knowing there are no blind spots.

Elsewhere, we tackled a recurring Loki crash-loop in a staging environment, restoring stability and ensuring logs flow reliably again. This kind of fix might go unnoticed day-to-day, but in production it’s the difference between chasing shadows and pinpointing root causes fast. We also standardized trace ID propagation across microservices, making it far easier to connect the dots between requests when debugging.

And we didn’t stop there. In a client’s AI environment, we deployed LangFuse, an open-source LLM monitoring tool, to capture detailed metrics on prompt/response performance. This gives data science teams real-time insights into model behavior and helps identify bottlenecks early.

VCs don’t care which test runner you use, but they watch deployment velocity. Fewer blocking bugs let you ship weekly instead of monthly, capturing market share earlier.

Every failed release burns CI/CD minutes, re-runs containers, and inflates your AWS invoice. Quality gates catch bad commits before they hit the expensive part of the pipeline.

Senior engineers would rather build features than babysit rollbacks. High-signal test suites reduce burnout and keep your best people around when stock options haven’t fully vested.

“Testing isn’t a cost center—it’s your cheapest scalability hack.”

Last week underscored why we put so much emphasis on automation and developer experience.

We diagnosed and resolved a Terraform Cloud issue that was blocking plans and applies on GitLab pushes. With the fix in place, infra-as-code deployments are once again flowing smoothly, keeping environments in sync with every commit.

In one FinTech project, we cleaned up a broken CI/CD pipeline after a retry mishap and added safeguards to prevent similar issues in future. This isn’t just about fixing pipelines; it’s about giving developers confidence to release without fear.

And for developers on PHP stacks, we rolled out a new socket extension across all environments to avoid those "works on my machine" surprises.

Meanwhile, an ad-hoc AWS EventBridge-to-Slack alerting logic was refactored into Terraform modules – making it reusable across projects with a single command. This is how we scale our best practices into repeatable, version-controlled building blocks.

Behind the scenes, our teams tackled a slate of bugs and maintenance tasks to improve system reliability.

We resolved an elusive issue where API calls intermittently failed with HTTP 500 errors, traced back to a race condition in a database migration script. With that gone, error rates dropped to zero. Another win came from fixing a “MySQL server has gone away” error during user registrations – now fortified with connection timeout tuning and retry logic.

We also put effort into reducing "alert fatigue." In one case, an on-call Slack channel was overwhelmed by noisy, non-actionable alerts. By fine-tuning thresholds and filtering out false positives, we cut the noise dramatically, helping engineers focus on real issues when they matter most.

And because good infrastructure isn’t just about uptime, we deep-cleaned obsolete chatbot services from production and published handover guides for complex services – ensuring smooth onboarding for anyone touching these systems.

While no major blockers derailed us, a thorny VPN connectivity issue in the SPM environment required urgent attention. Developers found themselves unable to connect to a secure service due to a rogue routing rule. After a deep-dive and swift fix, connectivity was restored, reminding us once again how critical vigilant network monitoring and documentation are.

• EKS Upgrade Rollouts: With validation complete, we’re preparing to upgrade a production cluster to Kubernetes v1.31 – staying current with AWS-supported versions for better performance and security.

• Monitoring Migration: The final push to migrate all remaining CloudWatch dashboards and alerts into Grafana. This "single pane of glass" will make on-call and observability much simpler for teams.

• Background Job Optimization: For BuyCycle, we’re re-architecting legacy background workers using KEDA to enable Kubernetes-native event-driven scaling. This ensures resource efficiency and a more stable API under heavy load.

• Incident Management Playbooks: We’ll formalize SRE-inspired runbooks and response structures for Corify, along with reviewing new security tooling for secrets management and endpoint protection.

A big shoutout to everyone who stayed sharp and proactive last week. Special kudos to the on-call crew who handled the VPN issue at 2 AM – your quick action kept developers unblocked. And yes, the Slack explosion of when all pipelines passed green on the first try? Chef’s kiss. Moments like these show why our engineering culture is built on curiosity, collaboration, and just the right amount of celebration.