Gabardo Engineering

Gabardo Engineering

The S3 at Scale Runbook

Detecting and fixing cardinality explosions in production buckets

Adrian Gabardo's avatar
Adrian Gabardo
Mar 31, 2026
∙ Paid

In the previous article - How a simple S3 design decision turned into a $7M cost - we analysed a production system that accumulated 1.56 trillion objects in a single S3 bucket. The architecture scaled perfectly from a functional perspective — but nearly triggered a $7.2M lifecycle transition event.

The root cause was not storage volume. It was object car…

User's avatar

Continue reading this post for free, courtesy of Adrian Gabardo.

Or purchase a paid subscription.
© 2026 Adrian Gabardo · Privacy ∙ Terms ∙ Collection notice
Start your SubstackGet the app
Substack is the home for great culture