Category: AWS Cloud + Public Cloud + Databases
I Have Two Outlooks and Neither One Is Working: The Enterprise Software Complexity Trap
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 […]
Read more →
From EC2 to Raspberry Pi: A Complete WordPress Migration 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 […]
Read more →
Why Multicloud Architecture 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 […]
Read more →
Reverse Engineering Your AWS Estate into Terraform Using CloudToRepo
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 […]
Read more →Database Maintenance Health Checks: SQL Server and PostgreSQL
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. […]
Read more →Aurora PostgreSQL Write Traffic, Saturation, and the Path to Throughput
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 […]
Read more →
Knowing Your IOPS Are Broken Is Not As Valuable As Knowing They Are About To Break
Andrew Baker | March 2026 Companion article to: https://andrewbaker.ninja/2026/03/01/the-silent-killer-in-your-aws-architecture-iops-mismatches/ 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 →The Silent Killer in Your AWS Architecture: IOPS Mismatches
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 […]
Read more →
WordPress Space Cleanup: A Free WordPress Databas, Media Library Cleanup Plugin and PNG to JPEG convertor
If you run a WordPress site for any length of time, the database quietly fills with junk. Post revisions stack up every time you hit Save. Drafts you abandoned years ago sit there. Spam comments accumulate. Transients expire but never get deleted. Orphaned metadata from plugins you uninstalled months ago quietly occupies table rows nobody […]
Read more →
WordPress Totally Free Backup and Restore: CloudScale Backup Plugin – Does Exactly What It Says
I’ve been running this blog on WordPress for years, and the backup situation has always quietly bothered me. The popular backup plugins either charge a monthly fee, cap you on storage, phone home to an external service, or do all three. I wanted something simple: a plugin that makes a zip file of my site, […]
Read more →