One of the sillier things I've done as an AWS/linux admin is provision an EBS disk as swap to an EC2 instance. I kept getting max allocate errors for a script I needed to run to execute a series of database queries. Reprovisioning to a new EC2 instance class with more RAM wasn't feasible at the time for some long-forgotten reason. I would never do this if I owned the disks - provisioning swap to SSD will greatly reduce the lifetime of the disk, among many reasons why this is less than ideal. But Amazon has plenty of money. I figured I could cheaply provision an EBS volume & buy myself enough swap to complete the query. Then, in some point in the future, I could create a more beautimous solution. Well, if you're a sysadmin you know how this story ends. I moved onto other fires/projects, quickly forgot about the swap situation, and here I am years later, deprovisioning the server, in all its swappy glory. This wouldn't warrant a blog post, except for the fact that I