#559: 12 Things You Should (and Shouldn't) Do in AWS

Your site is down. It's 3am. Is it a bug, a bill, or a breach? You can't tell yet, and everyone is watching you find out. Matt Lea has spent fifteen years being the person companies call when an outage is costing them real money per hour, and his whole argument is that everything you'd want in that moment gets decided months earlier, on ordinary afternoons, when someone chose the convenient thing. We walk his top twelve dos and don'ts in AWS - infrastructure as code, IAM roles instead of access keys, private subnets, no wildcards, no public buckets - and I push on which of them actually matter if you're one person on a small VPS. Then we get to Cloud War Games, where Matt breaks things on purpose so your team's first real incident isn't their first incident. Let's get into it.

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Links from the show

Guest
Matt Lea: linkedin.com

Talk Python Certificates: training.talkpython.fm/certificates

Schematical: schematical.com
CloudWarGames.com: cloudwargames.com
Zero to Hero on AWS Security: www.oreilly.com
Repo: github.com
Custom Wheel Offset: customwheeloffset.com
2012 TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon: techcrunch.com
tech comics: schematical.com
shhgit: github.com
Zero Trust in 200ms: Implementing Identity-Per-Transaction: us.pycon.org
Coolify: coolify.io
returned to full GA Nov 2025: aws.amazon.com
Signed URLs/cookies: docs.aws.amazon.com
Cloudflare: www.cloudflare.com
Bunny Shield: bunny.net
Cloud War Games One: www.youtube.com
Cloud War Games Two: www.youtube.com
LinkedIn: linkedin.com
YouTube: youtube.com
KnocKnoc: knocknoc.io

Watch this episode on YouTube: youtube.com
Episode #559 deep-dive: talkpython.fm/559
Episode transcripts: talkpython.fm

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