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.
Memgraph & Claude Desktop: Detect Mule Accounts on macOS
1. Introduction This guide walks you through setting up Memgraph with Claude Desktop on your laptop to analyze relationships between mule accounts in banking systems. By the end of this tutorial, you’ll have a working setup where Claude can query and visualize banking transaction patterns to identify potential mule account networks. Why Graph Databases for […]
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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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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 […]
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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 […]
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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SQL Server & PostgreSQL Database Health Check Guide
Every production database accumulates the same class of problems over time. Indexes fragment as rows are inserted and deleted unevenly. Dead tuples pile up faster than background processes can reclaim them. Queries that once ran against a small table now scan tens of millions of rows because nobody added an index when the table grew. […]
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WordPress Database & Media Cleanup Plugin: Free Guide
If you run a WordPress site for any length of time, the database quietly fills with junk. Post revisions stack up every time you hit Save. Drafts you abandoned years ago sit there. Spam comments accumulate. Transients expire but never get deleted. Orphaned metadata from plugins you uninstalled months ago quietly occupies table rows nobody […]
Read more →WordPress on AWS Graviton: Deploy & Migrate in Minutes
Running WordPress on ARM-based Graviton instances delivers up to 40% better price-performance compared to x86 equivalents. This guide provides production-ready scripts to deploy an optimised WordPress stack in minutes, plus everything you need to migrate your existing site. Why Graviton for WordPress? Graviton3 processors deliver: The t4g.small instance (2 vCPU, 2GB RAM) at ~$12/month handles […]
Read more →AWS S3 ETags: Verify File Integrity Using MD5 Hashes
I was playing with S3 the other day an I noticed that a file which I had uploaded twice, in two different locations had an identical ETag. This immediately made me think that this tag was some kind of hash. So I had a quick look AWS documentation and this ETag turns out to be […]
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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 […]
Read more →How to Trigger Autoscaling Events with stress-ng Command
If you are testing how your autoscaling policies respond to CPU load then a really simple way to test this is using the “stress” command. Note: this is a very crude mechanism to test and wherever possible you should try and generate synthetic application load.
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