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.
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 […]
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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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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 […]
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’s 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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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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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 […]
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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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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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CloudScale Free WordPress Backup & Restore Plugin Guide
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, […]
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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 Bank Architecture Determines Resilience More Than Size
1. Size Was Once Mistaken for Stability For most of modern banking history, stability was assumed to increase with size. The thinking was the bigger you are, the more you should care, the more resources you can apply to problems. Larger banks had more capital, more infrastructure, and more people. In a pre-cloud world, this […]
Read more →Auto Stop and Start EC2 Instances with Lambda
Below is a quick (am busy) outline on how to automatically stop and start your EC2 instances. Step 1: Tag your resources In order to decide which instances stop and start you first need to add an auto-start-stop: Yes tag to all the instances you want to be affected by the start / stop functions. Note: You […]
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