Chevre, this week’s parsha is Vayishlach (וַיִּשְׁלַ֨ח). This week we have the long process of reconciliation between Yaakov (Yisrael) and Esav. Yaakov splits his family (resources) into 2 groups (or AZs). He goes back for some forgotten item (cleaning up unused resources), fights with the “angel” and is told he’ll be receiving a new name (product rebranding). He then sends his family in drips and drabs to appease Esav (staying within throttling limits). Eventually, the mission is accomplished and Esav and Yaakov reconcile.

When I think about potentially difficult or problematic connections, I start to think about architectures that would limit the risks. We can use private link so that all connections are limited in scope between VPCs. We can even have those private links now cross regions for easier administration. Private link has security groups so you can further limit what ports are available and potentially what IP ranges are accessible. And there is an NLB associated with private link so you can limit open connections and other DDOS/DOS type attacks. And the NLB can support multi-AZ so that if 1 AZ has a problem, the workload will continue and the customer shouldn’t notice.

We see that Yaakov uses many of these techniques to appease Esav. I guess this makes Esav the big bad API service. May we learn from Yaakov and always play nicely with our APIs or risk them hitting us back (like with throttling). Shabbat Shalom.