Postmortems
Practical
By Samson Tanimawo, PhD
Published Aug 9, 2025
4 min read
AWS S3 2017 Outage Postmortem
Lessons from the famous incident.
Overview
AWS S3 2017 Outage Postmortem: a practical look at the patterns that work and the trade-offs that matter.
Lessons from the famous incident. The full picture, in three sections.
The approach
Each pattern has a context where it wins. Understand the context before applying.
Tooling matters. Pick tools that fit the workflow; don't force-fit.
Why this compounds
Healthy practice compounds year over year. Year 1 lays the foundation.
Year 2 and beyond: practices become habits; quality improves measurably.