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.
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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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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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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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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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 →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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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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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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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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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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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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