AWS, Cloud & Database Architecture
Banking-grade AWS deployments, multi-cloud trade-offs, and database design at scale. The architectural decisions that prevent 3am incidents.
How to Prevent SQL Server Query Stampedes: Protecting OLTP from Reporting and AI Agent Queries
By Andrew Baker 路 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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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 […]
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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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Security Vibing: Why Teams Keep Sacrificing to the Risk Gods Instead of Managing Real Risk
Something interesting happens inside large organisations when a new technology appears and nobody is quite sure how dangerous it is: people start sacrificing things. A feature gets disabled, a setting gets locked down, and a capability gets removed. Another approval step gets inserted into the process, or someone quietly updates a policy. Everyone feels slightly […]
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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 路 What it is not 路 Setup script 路 Performance tests 路 Monitoring […]
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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 to Prevent PostgreSQL (including Aurora Serverless) 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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SQL Server 2019 Diagnostic Queries: Glenn Berry’s Guide
Finding issues in SQL Server is not alway that easy. It can be NUMA issues, it can be DBCC settings, it can even be the CU (eg CU19). A friend sent me a very useful query a few years ago that really helped me fault find these issues. It was written by Glenn Berry, but […]
Read more →Model Context Protocol: Enterprise Implementation Guide
The Model Context Protocol (MCP) represents a fundamental shift in how we integrate Large Language Models (LLMs) with external data sources and tools. As enterprises increasingly adopt AI powered applications, understanding MCP鈥檚 architecture, operational characteristics, and practical implementation becomes critical for technical leaders building production systems. 1. What is Model Context Protocol? Model Context Protocol […]
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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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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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PostgreSQL Prepared Statements: Fix Plan Caching Memory Issues
Prepared statements are one of PostgreSQL’s most powerful features for query optimization. By parsing and planning queries once, then reusing those plans for subsequent executions, they can dramatically improve performance. But this optimization comes with a hidden danger: sometimes caching the same plan for every execution can lead to catastrophic memory exhaustion and performance degradation. […]
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