That Remote Life: An IT Manager’s Perspective / Chapter 1 Part 2

Wayne Armstrong • June 20, 2021
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CHAPTER 1/PART 2: ROUTINE

I caught my Mom in the middle of making dinner for my Dad. The 8 hour difference is a pain sometimes, but it is something we must live with, being so far apart. I didn’t have much time, so I got straight to the point.


I talked to her about the issues I was having and asked her about how she dealt with staying and working at home all those years. She laughed, as I hear her clanging things around the kitchen. I asked her why she was laughing and she laughed some more. I waited for her to stop and told her I was being serious. She sighed and said; “Wayne, you will do anything to get out of cleaning your room.”


Now, my Mom is getting on in years and I know I’m the youngest (the baby), which means that my parents are incapable of seeing me as anything other as a child, but her answer worried me. I said, “Mom, I’m being serious”. She said; “So am I”.


So I didn’t say anything, chatted to her a little bit and ended the call. A little mad and worried about her state of mind, I started work and went about my day. I was thinking about her and the fact she was getting old and that she probably thought I was being unorganized or that I was shirking my chores like I did all those years ago.


The next day, after my shower, I was thinking about the conversation and I scanned my room like I did when I was 10. Looking to see if there was something out of place that she would catch me on and make me stay in the room for another hour. I was thinking back to how horrible it was then and how bored I was and that I always ended up crawling onto the bed and napping.


To be honest, I had spent so much time in my room that I started to feel those old feelings and wanted to just crawl onto the bed nap. Then it hit me, I realized what she meant.

AWS stumbled this morning. Here’s why multi‑cloud keeps you moving.

By Shawn Akins • October 20, 2025
October 20, 2025 — Early today, Amazon Web Services experienced a major incident centered in its US‑EAST‑1 (N. Virginia) region. AWS reports the event began around 12:11 a.m. PT and tied back to DNS resolution affecting DynamoDB , with mitigation within a couple of hours and recovery continuing thereafter. As the outage rippled, popular services like Snapchat, Venmo, Ring, Roblox, Fortnite , and even some Amazon properties saw disruptions before recovering. If your apps or data are anchored to a single cloud, a morning like this can turn into a help‑desk fire drill. A multi‑cloud or cloud‑smart approach helps you ride through these moments with minimal end‑user impact. What happened (and why it matters) Single‑region fragility: US‑EAST‑1 is massive—and when it sneezes, the internet catches a cold. Incidents here have a history of wide blast radius. Shared dependencies: DNS issues to core services (like DynamoDB endpoints) can cascade across workloads that never directly “touch” that service. Multi‑cloud: practical resilience, not buzzwords For mid‑sized orgs, schools, and local government, multi‑cloud doesn’t have to mean “every app in every cloud.” It means thoughtful redundancy where it counts : Multi‑region or multi‑provider failover for critical apps Run active/standby across AWS and Azure (or another provider), or at least across two AWS regions with automated failover. Start with citizen‑facing portals, SIS/LMS access, emergency comms, and payment gateways. Portable platforms Use Kubernetes and containers, keep state externalized, and standardize infra with Terraform/Ansible so you can redeploy fast when a region (or a provider) wobbles. (Today’s DNS hiccup is exactly the kind of scenario this protects against.) Resilient data layers Replicate data asynchronously across clouds/regions; choose databases with cross‑region failover and test RPO/RTO quarterly. If you rely on a managed database tied to one region, design an escape hatch. Traffic and identity that float Use global traffic managers/DNS to shift users automatically; keep identity (MFA/SSO) highly available and not hard‑wired to a single provider’s control plane. Run the playbook Document health checks, automated cutover, and comms templates. Then practice —tabletops and live failovers. Many services today recovered within hours, but only teams with rehearsed playbooks avoided user‑visible downtime. The bottom line Cloud concentration risk is real. Outages will happen—what matters is whether your constituents, students, and staff feel it. A pragmatic multi‑cloud stance limits the blast radius and keeps your mission‑critical services online when one provider has a bad day. Need a resilience check? Akins IT can help you prioritize which systems should be multi‑cloud, design the right level of redundancy, and validate your failover plan—without overspending. Let’s start with a quick, 30‑minute review of your most critical services and RPO/RTO targets. (No slideware, just actionable next steps.)

Microsoft Confirms GoAnywhere Exploitation: What IT Leaders Need to Know

By Shawn Akins • October 13, 2025
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The Windows 10 Deadline Is Here—Are You Ready for What Happens Next?

By Shawn Akins • October 13, 2025
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