The calendar says it’s Tuesday, which means the caffeine has just started to wage its war against the existential dread of my inbox. The first digital missive of the day arrives, flagged with the digital equivalent of a child’s crayon scrawl: LOW PRIORITY. It’s from Brenda in Accounting, a department whose grasp on technology is so tenuous they probably think “the cloud” is where their missing receipts go.
The Request: Brenda’s request, a masterpiece of corporate nonsense, reads: “Hi, can you please make sure our monthly finance reports are backed up forever? We need them to be super secure but also I need to be able to get them immediately if I accidentally delete one. Thanks!”
My Internal Monologue: “Backed up forever.” “Super secure.” “Get them immediately.” Pick one, Brenda. Maybe two if you’re lucky. You can’t have all three, especially when your department’s idea of a strong password is Password123!. She wants the permanence of a black hole with the convenience of a vending machine. The sheer, unadulterated ignorance is almost breathtaking. She doesn’t want a backup solution; she wants a magic undo button for her own incompetence.
The “Fix”: Fine. She wants forever? She’ll get forever.
First, I create a new S3 bucket with a name so arcane it would make a cryptographer weep: actg-finrpt-lglhld-qtr-arc-7a9f.
Next, I craft a beautiful IAM policy for Brenda’s user account. This policy grants her s3:PutObject permissions. That’s it. Nothing else. No s3:GetObject, no s3:ListBucket, and certainly no s3:DeleteObject. She can scream files into the void, but the void will not scream back.
But the real masterstroke is the bucket’s lifecycle policy. I configure a rule that any object uploaded is immediately transitioned to the S3 Glacier Deep Archive storage class. For the uninitiated, that’s Amazon’s digital oubliette. It’s cheap to store things there “forever,” but retrieving them? That takes about 12 hours and costs more than her lunch budget for the week.
I close her ticket with a single, helpful line: “Hi Brenda, all files uploaded to the actg-finrpt-lglhld-qtr-arc-7a9f bucket will now be retained indefinitely per your request. You can upload files via the AWS CLI. The documentation is attached.”
The Outcome: Brenda, who thinks a “CLI” is a type of fancy car, is now completely lost. She can upload her reports, but she can never see them in the bucket to confirm they’re there. The one time she inevitably deletes a local copy and sends a frantic, ALL CAPS follow-up, I’ll get to explain the “standard 12-hour retrieval window for long-term archival storage” and forward the bill for the expedited retrieval request she’ll beg for.
Closing Thought: It’s not my fault users can’t be bothered to understand the basic principles of data temperature. I gave her exactly what she asked for: a permanent, secure place for her files. If she can’t handle the consequences of her own poorly-defined requirements, perhaps she should stick to abacuses.