Choosing between an Application Load Balancer and API Gateway is not a feature comparison. It is a choice of hard limits, a billing curve and an authentication story. Here is how each one bills you, which constraints surface months later, what ALB's native JWT validation changes, and a decision procedure you can run in ten minutes.
Choosing between Lightsail, EC2 and ECS for a small client workload is not a performance question. It is a question about which constraints you are accepting and how expensive they are to reverse. Profiles of all three with where each wins and loses, the cost levers that actually move the bill, a six-step decision procedure, and the arguments that fall apart on contact with a real project.
Benchmarks pick the wrong winner. Here is how Nginx, Apache and Caddy actually differ in production: how each one fails under load, who owns certificate renewal, and where configuration lives when a developer needs to change it. Includes a decision procedure and the mistakes I see most.
Readiness probes are necessary for Kubernetes zero-downtime rollouts, but they only close one of four gaps. Here is what actually drops requests during a deploy: the race between SIGTERM and endpoint propagation, probes that lie, surge settings that quietly delete capacity, and load balancers that never watched EndpointSlices in the first place.