nginx

Reading Time: 6 minutesWe built a watchdog to automatically reload nginx whenever it started timing out against an AWS ALB — the classic “cached a stale IP” problem. It worked… until a different domain on the same box went down for hours while the script sat there happily reporting that everything was fine. This is the story of how a monitoring gap, a partial deploy, and a threshold tuned for the wrong failure shape turned a good idea into false confidence — and what it took to fix the class of problem instead of just the one instance that had already bitten us.