Title: March 26, 2007 – Debugging the Night Shift with EC2

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It’s late on a Monday night in March 2007, and I find myself staring at my computer screen like it’s the most important thing in the world. I’ve been working for hours, trying to figure out why our application has gone down again. It’s a common problem, but every time it happens, it feels like the end of the world.

Our system is built on AWS EC2 and S3, which are still gaining traction even though Amazon has only just launched its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) in November 2006. I’ve been doing this for a while now—20 years in IT, but it never gets any easier when you have to troubleshoot an outage late at night.

The application is a content management system serving small businesses and non-profits. It’s critical that they can update their sites easily without needing technical expertise. But tonight, something has gone wrong. The site is down, and I’m the only one who seems to know it’s happening.

I dive into the logs, but there’s nothing immediately obvious. I’ve been staring at the same stack trace for over an hour now, trying different permutations of variables. It feels like I’ve exhausted all possible fixes. But something nags at me, so I check the AWS Management Console.

Sure enough, it’s a resource issue. One of our Amazon Machine Images (AMI) has run out of disk space. This is a common problem, but one that can be easily missed in the rush to get things up and running. EC2 was still a relatively new concept back then, so some best practices hadn’t quite settled in yet.

I go through the steps to increase the volume size on the instance, which involves shutting it down, expanding the root filesystem, and restarting. It’s a bit of a hassle, but it gets the job done. By 2 AM, our site is back online, and I feel a mix of relief and frustration.

The relief comes from knowing that the issue is fixed, but the frustration comes from the fact that this could have been avoided with better monitoring and automated alerts. We’re still small, so we don’t have dedicated DevOps or SRE roles to handle these issues. But as our business grows, it will become a critical need.

Looking back at the Hacker News headlines of March 2007, it’s interesting how they reflect the zeitgeist of the time. “Why to Not Start a Startup” and “Paul Graham convinced me to drop out of school / quit my job” remind me of how many people were starting tech companies despite (or because of) the economic crash hitting the industry hard.

I wonder what advice I would give to those founders now, with hindsight. Would it be different if they had been more cautious in choosing technology stacks or less reliant on EC2’s then-new and still somewhat unstable infrastructure? These are the kinds of questions that keep me up at night as an engineer—wondering how to do things better next time.

As I close out my terminal, I feel a mix of emotions. The technical problem is solved, but there’s always more to learn about reliability, scalability, and best practices in cloud computing. Tomorrow, we’ll start the process all over again with new lessons in our toolkit.

Goodnight, EC2. And remember: I’m only human, even if you sometimes make me feel otherwise.

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This blog post reflects the reality of working through an issue late at night in a nascent cloud ecosystem, while also providing a glimpse into the broader tech landscape of 2007.