Engineering essays from the bench.
War stories, architecture decisions, and the occasional tirade. Written by the engineers who shipped it.
Scaling a Startup on AWS: A Cost-Conscious Architecture
A startup AWS architecture that starts lean and scales by symptom: day-one foundations, ECS on Fargate, Terraform, NAT and database traps, cost controls.
Istio Service Mesh Guide: mTLS, Traffic and Ambient Mode
A production guide to Istio: when a mesh pays off, ambient vs sidecar, strict mTLS and authorization, canary routing, telemetry, and what breaks.
Terraform in Production: State, Modules, CI/CD and Drift
How to run Terraform in production: repo layout, S3 state with native locking, versioned modules, OIDC plan and apply in CI, policy checks, drift alerts.
Multi-Cloud Strategy: When It Makes Sense and How to Do It
When multi-cloud is worth the cost and when it is not: good and bad reasons, workable patterns, cross-cloud identity, networking, egress and failure modes.
Cloud Cost Optimization: 10 Strategies in the Right Order
Ten cloud cost optimization strategies in the order that works: attribution, idle cleanup, right-sizing, Savings Plans, Spot, storage and data transfer.
Microservices Architecture Patterns That Work in Production
The microservices patterns that matter in production: service boundaries, gateway and BFF, outbox, saga, idempotency, resilience, and when not to split.
Cloud Migration Strategies: The 7 Rs and How to Choose
Choose a cloud migration strategy per workload: the 7 Rs compared, a decision flow, dependency mapping, a wave plan and a low-downtime database cutover.
Serverless Architecture Patterns for Event-Driven Apps
Production serverless patterns: SQS load leveling, EventBridge choreography, Step Functions sagas, the outbox, plus idempotency and failure handling.
GitOps Deployment Strategies with Argo CD and Flux
How GitOps deployment works in production: repo layout, working Argo CD and Flux manifests, canary rollouts, secrets, and the failure modes to plan for.
Cloud Disaster Recovery: RTO, RPO and the Four DR Strategies
Cloud disaster recovery from RTO and RPO: the four DR strategies, a decision table, cross-region replication, Terraform backups and failover, and testing.
