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Dev Notes1 min read
Keeping 35+ Apps Alive Without Losing My Mind
Some nights it's not code, it's triage. Here's how I actually keep 35+ live AWS apps from eating my sleep.
35 apps. One brain. No cloning machine yet.
People assume 'leading 35+ live apps' means I've got some fancy dashboard and a calm cup of coffee every morning. Nah. Most days it's alerts, Slack pings, and me deciding in real time what's actually on fire vs what can wait till after lunch.
The truth is you don't survive this by being a hero. You survive it by building boring, repeatable systems so 90% of the fires never start.
- Standardized deployment pipelines so every app fails the same predictable way
- Nginx + Docker setups that are basically copy-paste across projects
- Cut AWS costs by 40% just by killing zombie resources
- Unused EBS volumes
- Idle EC2 instances
- Forgotten staging environments
- A team that knows which fires are actually mine to fight
Automate the repetitive incident response steps
Get monitoring alerts to stop crying wolf
Sleep past 2am without a phone buzz
You don't scale by working harder, you scale by making your future self's job boring.
Leading an 8-10 person team through this taught me more about systems thinking than any freelance project ever did. When it's your name on the pager, you stop writing clever code and start writing survivable code.
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