How a $10M Payment Platform Stopped Chasing Manual Scaling and Learned What 99.999999999% Durability Actually Means

https://s3.amazonaws.com/column/how-high-traffic-online-platforms-use-amazon-s3-for-secure-scalable-data-storage/index.html

This is a pragmatic case study about an engineering team that treated outages as a staffing problem. They accepted manual scaling, made ad hoc fixes during peak traffic, and treated storage durability as a marketing claim