AWS, Cloud & Database Architecture
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Banking-grade AWS deployments, multi-cloud trade-offs, and database design at scale. The architectural decisions that prevent 3am incidents.
From zero to a full AWS account health check with Claude Code
Most AWS accounts accumulate risk quietly. Nobody sets out to leave a broker with zero alarms, or to run two supposedly multi availability zone brokers in the same availability zone, or to leave statement level database logging writing customer data to plain text files. These things happen one reasonable seeming decision at a time, and […]
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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 […]
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How to Prevent PostgreSQL Query Stampedes: Protecting OLTP from Reporting and AI Agent Queries
A production incident that shows up again and again has the same shape. Someone, whether a human analyst, a BI tool, or increasingly an AI agent writing SQL, runs a query with no WHERE clause, an accidental cross join, or a wildly underestimated scan. Postgres has no concept of “this query looks expensive, so deprioritize […]
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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 […]
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Learning to Drive on the Edge of a Cliff: Why the VPC Is the Wrong Object for Financial Services
Most financial services firms start their cloud migration the way a learner driver would start a lesson on the edge of a cliff face. The car is already nose out over the drop, the engine is running, and the instructor’s first words are not “let’s talk about steering” or “here’s how the indicators work.” The […]
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PostgresDB Proxy: AI Powered Data Masking and Zero Trust Access for PostgreSQL
Presented at AWS Summit Johannesburg Leon Rajindrapersadh, CTO of Capitec, and Terrence Naidoo, Principal Solutions Architect at AWS, are presenting this architecture at AWS Summit Johannesburg on 19 August 2026 at the Gallagher Convention Centre. The session is titled “Database proxy for real time query optimization” and runs for 45 minutes from 13:30 in Breakout […]
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How SQL Server Chooses Query Plans, Why Statistics Betray You, and What To Do About It
1. The optimizer is making a bet, not a calculation Every time SQL Server compiles a query it runs an auction. The optimizer generates a handful of candidate plans, estimates the cost of each one in abstract units that roughly map to disk and CPU work, and picks the cheapest candidate it found within its […]
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S3 Files: AWS Finally Solves the Object Storage to File System Problem
A deep technical walkthrough of Amazon S3 Files: what it actually is, where it earns its complexity, setup scripts, monitoring, costs and the production gotchas that will bite you if you skip straight to the mount command. Jump to: What it is · What it is not · Setup script · Performance tests · Monitoring […]
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The Contract Clause That Cannot Save You: What Switzerland’s Rejection of Palantir Means for Enterprise Technology Leaders
There is a version of this story that most technology vendors would prefer you heard. In that version, Switzerland evaluated Palantir’s data analytics platform, found it impressive, but ultimately declined due to vague concerns about national sovereignty: a regulatory sentiment, a political posture, nothing that applies to a commercial enterprise operating under normal procurement constraints. […]
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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 […]
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AWS Business Value Ratio: The Cost Health Check Your FinOps Team Is Missing
1. Two causes, one bill AWS cost posture problems in product accounts come from two distinct sources, and most remediation frameworks conflate them, which is why so much cost optimisation effort produces disappointing results. The detection scripts behind this analysis are published at github.com/andrewbakercloudscale/aws-bvr1. The more common cause is drift. Engineers make locally reasonable decisions […]
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AWS Risk: Stop Auditing Risks and Start Measuring Loss Pathways
Most cloud governance programmes begin with good intentions and eventually collapse under their own weight. The team starts with a handful of useful controls, someone adds tagging standards, another team adds cost optimisation, security introduces benchmark scanning, and platform engineering introduces configuration standards. Before long the report contains thousands of findings spread across hundreds of […]
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