The lukewarm sludge they call coffee in this place had barely hit my system when the Slack notifications started. Blinking little red dots of pure, unadulterated idiocy, courtesy of one Dilbert McStumbles, a “manager” whose primary contribution to the cloud infrastructure is generating more CO2 through panicked breathing.
McStumbles: “@CloudGod (because that’s what they should call me), the ‘SynergySpark Engagement Platform’ is DOWN! This is CRITICAL! The execs need their daily dose of buzzword bingo! ETA on fix?!?!”
Ah, SynergySpark. A glorious monolith of incompetence some overpaid consultant convinced the C-suite was “next-gen.” It probably runs on a single, oversized EC2 instance with an unpatched kernel, spewing logs into a bottomless S3 bucket no one ever looks at. My predecessor’s masterpiece, and therefore, my problem.
I let the message marinate. Let him feel the icy grip of helplessness. My job description technically includes “Evaluate system utilization, monitor response time, and provide primary support for detection and correction of operational problems.” The key word there is detection. I’ve detected the problem: McStumbles exists. The correction part is where I get creative.
Another ping. McStumbles: “HELLO?!?!? Are you seeing this? The app is just GONE. Users are reporting a 503! Is it the WAF? Did an S3 bucket go rogue? Are the EKS pods in a crash loop?! We need ACTION!”
Bless his cotton socks. He’s learned some acronyms. Probably from a “Cloud for Dummies” webinar he expensed.
I finally deign to reply. Me: “Investigating. The ‘SynergySpark Engagement Platform’ has a complex microservice architecture distributed across several Availability Zones, leveraging a dynamic scaling group for its EC2 fleet, fronted by an Application Load Balancer, with data persisted in a multi-AZ RDS instance and cached via ElastiCache. Any number of these highly advanced, interconnected services could be experiencing transient issues. I’ll need to meticulously review the CloudWatch metrics, correlate with AWS CloudTrail logs for any unauthorized API calls – wouldn’t want to think someone with overly broad IAM permissions tried to ‘optimize’ something, would we? – and then potentially dive into VPC flow logs if it’s a networking anomaly.”
Silence. Beautiful, terrified silence. I haven’t even looked at the console yet. Probably just needs a reboot, or more likely, someone fat-fingered a security group rule again. Yesterday, it was a user who’d managed to set their S3 bucket to “public” and then wondered why their “secret” company picnic photos were on a Reddit thread.
My “after-hours support program” participation is a myth. My phone goes into a Faraday cage the moment I clock out. And “Change Requests”? They get submitted when I decide a change is happening, usually to make my life easier and theirs slightly more bewildering. “Utilize metrics and cloud native consumption-based services to improve cost efficiencies”? Sure, I efficiently ensure my own job security by being the only one who can navigate the labyrinth I’ve “optimized.”
Another ping. This one’s from my actual boss, probably forwarded from McStumbles’ boss’s boss. Boss: “Team, need an update on SynergySpark. High visibility.”
Me: “Pinpointed a potential resource contention issue within the primary EKS cluster affecting service discovery. Am initiating a controlled pod eviction and redeployment sequence. Will monitor telemetry. ETA indeterminate due to the sensitive nature of the operation.”
Translation: I just bounced the main EC2 instance. Let the auto-scaling group earn its keep. If that doesn’t work, I’ll check if McStumbles’ IAM user still has console access. Revoking that usually fixes a multitude of sins.
And they wonder why I’m hostile to “standardizing processes.” My process is flawless: user complains, I make them feel small, problem magically resolves itself (or I click one button), I remain a god. Works every time. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have some “programs or scripts for various repetitive functions” to not document. Like the one that automatically throttles bandwidth to users who submit more than three tickets a week. Purely for “cost efficiencies,” of course.