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October 14th, 2025: President Trump posthumously awards Charlie Kirk the Presidential Medal of Freedom. September 25th: State Department quietly revokes 47 visas for non-citizens who celebrated Kirk's assassination. Justice without revenge - that's the Christian balance we all need to understand.

Five weeks after starting this podcast inspired by Charlie's example, watching his widow Erica accept that medal while justice was quietly served taught me something deeper: It's easy to be bold when angry. What's hard is pursuing justice while extending grace.

THE RECEIPTS:

• Presidential Medal of Freedom ceremony: Oct 14, 2025, White House Rose Garden
• Visa revocations: 47 non-citizens, Sept 25, 2025
• Legal authority: Immigration & Nationality Act §212(a)(3)(B)
• White House transcript available at whitehouse.gov
• Connection to EEOC v. Apple Inc. Sabbath case (filed Sept 30, 2025)
• Groff v. DeJoy Supreme Court religious accommodation standard

WHAT WE COVER: The biblical tension between Romans 12 (do not take revenge) and Romans 13 (government authority to pursue justice). How Erica Kirk's grace under pressure exemplifies Proverbs 31. Why visa revocations aren't censorship but consequences. The connection to our Apple Sabbath episode and consistent standards. Practical application in tech workplace discrimination.

KEY SCRIPTURE: Romans 12:17-21 - Personal revenge vs. governmental justice Romans 13:1-4 - Authority established by God Micah 6:8 - Act justly, love mercy, walk humbly Proverbs 24:17-18 - Don't gloat over enemies

THE TAKEAWAY: Katie Kirk can forgive murderers personally while supporting their prosecution. That's not hypocritical - that's biblical. We're moving from anger to action, from outrage to organization, from revenge fantasies to principled governance.

As Christians in tech, we can pursue justice through proper channels (Title VII, HR complaints, legal action) while extending personal grace. We can stand firm on principles while showing mercy to individuals. We can demand accountability while refusing to dehumanize.

WHO THIS IS FOR: Silent Christians in tech tired of hiding their faith. Conservatives facing discrimination. Anyone figuring out how to maintain integrity while facing injustice. Tech professionals who want excellence without compromising values.

I'm still a flawed Christian - drink beer, swear like a sailor, figuring this out one day at a time. But the Kirk family's example is showing the path forward.

CONNECT: 🌐 FaithFreedomTech.com 🐦 X/Twitter: @FaithFT_Podcast
📱 Instagram/TikTok: @FaithFreedomTech 📧 scott@faithfreedomtech.com

Available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, and everywhere you listen.

NEXT EPISODES: Tuesday: "AI Governance: Enterprise Frameworks" (Tech Deep Dive) Thursday: "Big Tech's Hypocrisy: Censoring Truth While Enabling Harm"

Facts matter. Receipts provided. Keep building, keep believing, keep pursuing justice without revenge.

Connect: IG/TikTok/FB/TruthSocial: @FaithFreedomTech | X: @faithft_podcast | FaithFreedomTech.com | Email: Scott@FaithFreedomTech.com

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Episode 9: When the Cloud Goes Dark - Observability After the AWS Outage

Yesterday's AWS outage cost hundreds of billions and took down Snapchat, Coinbase, Ring, even Amazon's own retail site. 15+ hours of chaos exposed a critical truth: most organizations are doing observability completely wrong.

THE RECEIPTS:
- October 20, 2025, 3:11 AM ET - DNS resolution failure in US-EAST-1
- 15 hours 12 minutes to full recovery
- 50,000+ simultaneous Downdetector reports at peak
- 70+ AWS services affected
- $2M/hour median cost for enterprises (New Relic 2025 Forecast)
- Organizations with proper observability: 50% cost reduction

WHAT FAILED:
DNS couldn't resolve DynamoDB endpoints → EC2 launch failures → Network Load Balancer health checks failed → 70+ services cascaded down. Even AWS's own monitoring systems went offline.

REAL IMPACT:
- Coinbase locked out during trading hours
- 8Sleep smart mattresses stuck in "relax mode"
- Disabled users lost Alexa-controlled lights
- Students couldn't submit assignments (Canvas down)
- Ring doorbells blind during security incidents
- Amazon warehouse workers sent to break rooms

THE THREE PILLARS OF OBSERVABILITY:
1. Metrics (Prometheus, CloudWatch, Azure Monitor)
2. Logs (ELK stack, Splunk, centralized logging)
3. Traces (OpenTelemetry, Jaeger for distributed systems)

CRITICAL LESSON: If your observability stack lives in the same cloud region you're monitoring, it goes down when you need it most. CloudWatch was down during the AWS outage.

5 LESSONS FROM THE OUTAGE:
1. Multi-region is the new minimum (multi-AZ didn't save anyone)
2. Observability must be independent (Datadog, New Relic, Dynatrace)
3. DR plans are useless if untested (monthly drills, not yearly)
4. Dependency mapping is critical (know what fails when X fails)
5. Control plane resilience matters (AWS support system went offline)

YOUR ACTION PLAN:
□ Audit observability stack independence
□ Map all cloud dependencies by region
□ Test DR plan THIS WEEK
□ Set up degradation alerts (not just "down" alerts)
□ Practice chaos engineering

"The prudent see danger and take refuge, but the simple keep going and pay the penalty." - Proverbs 27:12

NEXT EPISODE: CI/CD Pipeline Security - SBOM, artifact signing, secrets management

SERIES ARC: This builds on our DevSecOps → Kubernetes → Multi-Cloud → Platform Engineering foundation.

FIND US:
🌐 FaithFreedomTech.com
📝 DevSecOpsWithScott.com
📝 scottwhoughton.medium.com
🐦 @FaithFT_Podcast (X)
📱 @FaithFreedomTech (everywhere else)

Available on all podcast apps - Apple, Spotify, Google, Amazon Music, and more.

#DevSecOps #CloudArchitecture #SiteReliability #AWS #Observability #MultiCloud

Connect: IG/TikTok/FB/TruthSocial: @FaithFreedomTech | X: @faithft_podcast | FaithFreedomTech.com | Email: Scott@FaithFreedomTech.com

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Platform Engineering isn't just another buzzword—it's the evolution that makes DevOps, DevSecOps, and SRE practices actually scale across entire organizations.

In this episode, Scott shares a real story from a scrum call where a simple code formatting mistake became the catalyst for building automated systems that eliminate toil forever. This is what platform engineering is all about: solving problems once at the platform level so everyone benefits.

What You'll Learn:

• The evolution from traditional DevOps to Platform Engineering
• How to build "Golden Paths" that make the right way the easy way
• Self-service infrastructure with guardrails
• Progressive enhancement approach (formatting → security → policy as code)
• AI-enhanced SDLC throughout the entire development lifecycle
• Real implementation patterns from Fortune 500 companies
• The 4 common mistakes that kill platform engineering initiatives
• DevSecOps maturity model (Levels 1-5)

Key Takeaway: If you're doing something manually more than twice, it's time to automate. Platform engineering is about systematically eliminating toil and building systems where excellence becomes the default path.

Scott draws from 20+ years in tech, his time in the Navy on the USS Ashland, and experience at Google PSO, AWS ProServe, and consulting with McKenzie, PWC, and Deloitte to show you how to implement these solutions at scale.

This episode sets up perfectly for next week's deep dive into observability and monitoring across multi-cloud environments.

Resources Mentioned:

• Medium Series: "Crafting the Modern IT Ecosystems" (Parts 3, 4, 11)
• DevSecOps Automation article
• DevSecOpsWithScott.com

Episode Links: 🎥 Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HV2yHjYuwHE 🌐 Full Show Notes: FaithFreedomTech.com 📱 Available on all podcast apps

Connect: Twitter/X: @FaithFT_Podcast All other platforms: @FaithFreedomTech

Action Items for This Week:

1. Identify one manual process you can automate
2. Talk to your developers about friction points
3. Research internal developer platforms (Backstage, Port)
4. Start thinking about your first Golden Path
5. Read the Medium series on Platform Engineering

Connect: IG/TikTok/FB/TruthSocial: @FaithFreedomTech | X: @faithft_podcast | FaithFreedomTech.com | Email: Scott@FaithFreedomTech.com