~ ❯ cat notes/001-read-the-deploy.md
001-read-the-deploy.md
Read the deploy, not the diagram
Every environment has two architectures — the one on the wiki and the one that is running.
The first thing I do on any engagement is stop reading documentation. Not because it is wrong on purpose, but because it describes intent, and intent is not what is serving traffic.
Pull the inventory from the API. List the accounts, the regions, the load balancers, the things with public IPs. Nine times out of ten there is something in there nobody in the room knew about, and it is usually the interesting part of the engagement.
The diagram is still useful. It tells you what the team believes, and the gap between belief and deployment is the actual scope of the work.