Earlier this year, AWS had a major Availability Zone outage in us-east-1. Only one AZ went down, but if your workloads were running there, you know how it went: alerts firing, runbooks open, manual fixes, and a race to move traffic before customers noticed. For those who were not lucky enough to be in a different AZ, it raised an obvious question: why isn’t there a button for this? There is. It’s called ARC Zonal Shift. ...
Switching kube-proxy mode from IPVS to nftables Many of you have heard about the nginx-ingress controller retirement, right? But have you also heard about the deprecation of IPVS mode in Kubernetes 1.35? Kubernetes 1.35 release notes: https://kubernetes.io/blog/2025/12/17/kubernetes-v1-35-release/#deprecation-of-ipvs-mode-in-kube-proxy If your Kubernetes clusters are running kube-proxy in IPVS mode, it is time to prepare for switching to nftables. What I found interesting is that the official AWS EKS documentation still recommends IPVS mode, with only a small mention that nftables is ‘in development’: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/eks/latest/best-practices/ipvs.html ...
Updated May 2026: This guide has been revised to support RouterOS 7.22. Starting with RouterOS v7.5, MikroTik introduced the ability to run Linux containers directly on supported devices. This opens up a world of possibilities from running ad-blockers like Pi-hole to local DNS resolvers such as DNSCrypt-proxy. In this guide, I’ll show how I migrated my Pi-hole setup from a Raspberry Pi Zero to a MikroTik router. So far it’s been running smoothly. ...
Reducing Cross-AZ Traffic in AWS and Avoiding NAT Loopback Pitfalls Recently, we decided to reduce cross-AZ traffic in our AWS environment to save on data transfer costs and improve latency. Current Setup Here’s a simplified view of our setup: NLB -> ingress-nginx -> containers Inside our EKS cluster, we enabled Topology Aware Routing . On the NLB and its target group, we: ...
Do you want a secure and convenient way to access internal AWS resources - like RDS databases or EC2 instances - from your local machine? Me too! Thanks to AWS Systems Manager (SSM), you can get shell access to EC2 instances without opening any inbound ports. Even better, since 2022, AWS also supports port forwarding over SSM, allowing access to nearly any internal AWS resource from your laptop - without requiring a bastion host with internet access. ...
A well-designed network architecture is the backbone of any cloud infrastructure. It ensures better performance, security, resilience, and easier troubleshooting. Additionally, choosing the right networking solutions can optimize costs by leveraging AWS services that align with your application’s needs. This article focuses on complex, large-scale setups where multiple teams operate across multiple AWS accounts and regions. Let’s dive into AWS’s networking offerings and explore the best options for connecting Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs) and external networks. This guide compares VPC Sharing, VPC Peering, AWS Transit Gateway (TGW), and AWS Cloud WAN, highlighting their use cases, advantages, and limitations. ...