Started the year by "flipping the final switch" on our months-long migration from colo-hosted system to EC2. The final operation was to promote our secondary in

Started the year by "flipping the final switch" on our months-long migration from colo-hosted system to EC2. The final operation was to promote our secondary in EC2 to primary, and point all read-write systems there before restarting the entire stack. (It was bit of an anti-climax.) Then proceeded to work on and push through any pending changes that allowed us to pass three separate audits. Towards end of the year, finally hosted the first meetup at our office. As to what I learned: 1) Implicit couplings are incredibly easy to introduce, even with designs that were explicitly set to avoid them. 2) Auditors mean well but rarely have a wider technical background. In gambling industry they are also terrified of running production systems in the cloud. Architectural decisions must be paired with what amounts to a PR effort aimed at third parties. 3) Organising even a casual event is a lot of invisible work.