AWS, Cloud & Database Architecture
Banking-grade AWS deployments, multi-cloud trade-offs, and database design at scale. The architectural decisions that prevent 3am incidents.
Redis vs Valkey: Enterprise Architecture Guide
Updated October 2026. This guide was first published in January 2026 and has been revised for Valkey 9.0 and 9.1, Redis 8.4 through 8.8, the Azure Cache for Redis retirement, corrected AWS pricing, the migration constraints that now matter more than they did at the fork, and a read latency regression on hash heavy workloads […]
Read more →
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Production Outage Triage with Amazon Bedrock
Andrew Baker — andrewbaker.ninja — 13 June 2026 How to use a large language model inside your own AWS account to interrogate your infrastructure while it is on fire So your production environment is throwing errors at 2 AM, your on-call engineer is staring at a wall of CloudWatch noise, and someone in the incident […]
Read more →
Aurora Serverless v2 PostgreSQL: Production Scaling Guide
Aurora Serverless v2 promises the dream of a database that automatically scales to meet demand, freeing engineering teams from capacity planning. The reality is considerably more nuanced. After running Serverless v2 PostgreSQL clusters under production workloads, I have encountered enough sharp edges to fill a blog post. This is that post. The topics covered here […]
Read more →
PostgreSQL Vacuum Optimization for Large Tables: Deep Dive
When managing large PostgreSQL tables with frequent updates, vacuum operations become critical for maintaining database health and performance. In this comprehensive guide, we’ll explore vacuum optimization techniques, dive deep into the pg_repack extension, and provide hands-on examples you can run in your own environment. 1. Understanding the Problem PostgreSQL uses Multi-Version Concurrency Control (MVCC) to […]
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 […]
Read more →
Rubrik Architecture: Why Restore, Not Backup, Is the Product
1. Backups Should Be Boring (and That Is the Point) Backups are boring. They should be boring. A backup system that generates excitement is usually signalling failure. The only time backups become interesting is when they are missing, and that interest level is lethal. Emergency bridges. Frozen change windows. Executive escalation. Media briefings. Regulatory apology […]
Read more →
Amazon Aurora DSQL: Performance, Limits & Architecture
1. Executive Summary Amazon Aurora DSQL represents AWS’s ambitious entry into the distributed SQL database market, announced at re:Invent 2024. It’s a serverless, distributed SQL database featuring active active high availability and PostgreSQL compatibility. While the service offers impressive architectural innovations including 99.99% single region and 99.999% multi region availability, but it comes with significant […]
Read more →
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 […]
Read more →
AWS NLB Sticky Sessions: Setup, Behavior & Pitfalls
When you deploy applications behind a Network Load Balancer (NLB) in AWS, you usually expect perfect traffic distribution, fast, fair, and stateless.But what if your backend holds stateful sessions, like in-memory login sessions, caching, or WebSocket connections and you need a given client to keep hitting the same target every time? That’s where NLB sticky […]
Read more →
How to Prevent SQL Server Query Stampedes: Protecting OLTP from Reporting and AI Agent Queries
By Andrew Baker · Group CIO, Capitec Bank SQL Server 2025 quietly closed several of the holes that made Resource Governor unusable as a containment layer, and the one objection everybody repeats, that its classification is spoofable, turns out to be an artefact of classifying on APP_NAME() rather than on the authenticated login. Classify on […]
Read more →
AWS Bedrock Model Lag: When Your AI Platform Leaves You a Generation Behind
DeepSeek, Kimi and GLM show why model choice and cloud choice can no longer be the same decision 1. Bedrock is a very AWS answer to generative AI Amazon Bedrock takes a chaotic market of model providers and wraps it in IAM, AWS networking, logging, governance, regional deployment and an existing enterprise commercial relationship. What […]
Read more →
PostgreSQL 18: Performance Guide for Serious Workloads
PostgreSQL 18: A Grown-Up Release for Serious Workloads Introduction Every few years PostgreSQL delivers a release that does not just add features, but quietly shifts what the database is capable of at scale. PostgreSQL 18 is one of those releases. This is not a flashy new syntax everywhere upgrade. Instead, Postgres 18 focuses on long-standing […]
Read more →