Category: Public Cloud + Databases
ARM Servers vs x86: How Edge ARM Servers with NVMe Storage and Cloudflare Could Disrupt Cloud Compute Economics
1. The uncomfortable starting point If this model is even directionally correct, a large percentage of enterprise compute is structurally mispriced, and most organisations are paying a permanent premium for infrastructure characteristics they no longer use. Cloud pricing only makes sense when you actively exploit elasticity. The majority of production workloads have quietly become steady-state […]
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Multistage Build Optimisation: The Difference Between Amateur Containers and Production Systems
Most teams assume containers are lightweight by default, but that assumption does not survive contact with a real production system. Containers become bloated, slow, insecure, and operationally expensive when left unmanaged, and the penalties compound at scale as CI pipelines slow down, deployments lag, autoscaling becomes inefficient, and infrastructure costs quietly rise. This post goes […]
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I Have Two Outlooks on a NASA Spacecraft and Neither Works
1. Ground Control to Major Redmond In early April 2026, four astronauts aboard the Orion spacecraft radioed Mission Control. They were travelling at over four thousand miles per hour, more than thirty thousand miles from Earth, on NASA’s first crewed lunar mission in more than fifty years. The hardware that got them there represents the […]
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EC2 to Raspberry Pi WordPress Migration: Full Guide
How I moved andrewbaker.ninja off AWS, saved hundreds of dollars a year, and ended up with better security in the process. Running a personal site on AWS is completely reasonable when you are starting out. The tooling is mature, the reliability is excellent, and you can spin up a new instance in seconds. But somewhere […]
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Why Multicloud Is Not a Cloud Resilience Strategy
There is a particular kind of nonsense that circulates in enterprise technology conversations, the kind that sounds like wisdom because it wears the clothes of prudence. Multicloud architecture as a cloud resilience strategy is that nonsense. It has the shape of risk management and the substance of a comfort blanket, and the industry has spent […]
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Reverse Engineer AWS to Terraform: CloudToRepo Guide
If you have ever inherited an AWS estate, you know the feeling before you can even describe it. Hundreds of resources spread across regions you did not know were enabled. Lambdas with no source repos. Config rules that predate the current team. IAM roles that look like they were generated by a sleep-deprived octopus at […]
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SQL Server & PostgreSQL Database Health Check Guide
Every production database accumulates the same class of problems over time. Indexes fragment as rows are inserted and deleted unevenly. Dead tuples pile up faster than background processes can reclaim them. Queries that once ran against a small table now scan tens of millions of rows because nobody added an index when the table grew. […]
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Aurora PostgreSQL Write Throughput: Saturation & Tuning Guide
1. Introduction Every engineering team that runs a high throughput transactional workload on Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL will eventually arrive at the same uncomfortable question: why does the database start refusing to go faster, and what can actually be done about it? Aurora’s architecture is genuinely brilliant, but it introduces a set of write path constraints […]
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Predict EBS and RDS IOPS Saturation Before It Breaks
Andrew Baker | March 2026 Companion article to: https://andrewbaker.ninja/2026/03/01/aws-iops-mismatch-fix-the-hidden-double-ceiling-bug/ Last week I published a script that scans your AWS estate and finds every EBS volume and RDS instance where your provisioned storage IOPS exceed what the compute instance can actually consume. That problem, the structural mismatch between storage ceiling and instance ceiling, is important and […]
Read more →AWS IOPS Mismatch: Fix the Hidden Double Ceiling Bug
Andrew Baker, Chief Information Officer at Capitec Bank There is a class of AWS architecture mistake that is genuinely difficult to see. It does not appear in your cost explorer as an obvious line item. It does not trigger a CloudWatch alarm. It does not show up in a well architected review unless the reviewer […]
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