#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. Episode sponsors Sentry Error Monitoring, Code talkpython26 Talk Python Courses Talk Python Courses 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 Theme Song: Developer Rap 🥁 Served in a Flask 🎸: talkpython.fm/flasksong ---== Don't be a stranger ==--- YouTube: youtube.com/@talkpython Bluesky: @talkpython.fm Mastodon: @talkpython@fosstodon.org X.com: @talkpython Michael on Bluesky: @mkennedy.codes Michael on Mastodon: @mkennedy@fosstodon.org Michael on X.com: @mkennedy