The obvious solution is not always the right one. When we hit a problem in OCI where KMS keys were refusing to delete; the obvious move was to force delete them. Try harder. Debug the script. Fix the error. We tried that. It kept failing. So we stopped and asked a different question. What if we stop trying to delete them where they are; and move them somewhere else first? We wrote a script that moves the keys to a separate isolated compartment. No active resources. No dependencies. Clean environment. Then we delete them there. It worked immediately. Same problem. Different angle. Completely different result. This is something I keep learning over and over in cloud engineering. When something is not working; the answer is rarely to push harder in the same direction. Sometimes you need to zoom out; question your assumptions and ask what else is possible. The cloud does not always behave the way you expect. Neither do real problems.…