Most slow-query problems are not a missing index, they are the wrong index, or ten indexes nobody needs. Start from the query plan, build the index the query actually wants, and drop the ones taxing every write.
A government directive can now switch off your AI provider overnight - and pricing, deprecation, and policy could always do it. If a core feature depends on one model API you don't control, that's a single point of failure. Here's how to treat model access like any other supply-chain risk.
RDS is often the second or third biggest line on an AWS bill, sometimes the first, and most of it is avoidable. The levers that move it: fix the queries before you upsize, match the instance to your load shape, and stop provisioning storage for data that has not arrived yet.
One product I worked on went from 8-second page loads to 500ms and conversion doubled. Performance is a P&L line. Here's the money math and what it means for SaaS.
A head-to-head benchmark of the same Spring Boot app built for the JVM and as a GraalVM native binary - on real AWS hardware with a real database, run multiple times. Native wins startup, memory, and predictability; the warm JVM wins the median, peak throughput, and often the tail too - but the JVM swings run-to-run while native stays flat.
The javax to jakarta package rename is the hard part of the Spring Boot 3 upgrade. Why the one-line sed trick quietly breaks javax.sql and javax.crypto, which packages actually move, and how OpenRewrite does the whole migration for you. Tested on real apps.
