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.
TPC-H Test Data for AWS Redshift and EMR: Setup Guide
If you need to test out your big data tools below is a useful set of scripts that I have used in the past for aws emr and redshift the below might be helpful:
Read more →SCP Files to EC2: Mac & Linux Command Guide
I always forget the syntax of SCP and so this is a short article with a simple example of how to SCP a file from your laptop to your EC2 instance and how to copy it back from EC2 to your laptop: Copying from Laptop to EC2 scp -i identity_file.pem source_file.extention username@public_ipv4_dns:/remote_path scp: Secure copy protocol-i: Identity […]
Read more →Protected: Neo by Capitec: AI Client Support That Resolves Issues Proactively
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Read more →AWS Error Messages, API Standards & Region Defaults: Fix Needed
This is a short blog, and its actually just simple a plea to AWS. Please can you do three things? North Virginia appears to be the AWS master node. Having this region as a master region causes a large number of support issues (for example S3, KMS, Cloudfront, ACM all use this pet region and […]
Read more →Auto-Recover a Failed WordPress Instance on AWS
When WordPress goes down on your AWS instance, waiting for manual intervention means downtime and lost revenue. Here are two robust approaches to automatically detect and recover from WordPress failures. Approach 1: Lambda Based Intelligent Recovery This approach tries the least disruptive fix first (restarting services) before escalating to a full instance reboot. Step 1: […]
Read more →Public Cloud Migration: Why Lift-and-Shift Strategies Fail
The cloud is hot…. not just a little hot, but smokin hot!! Covid is messing with the economy, customers are battling financially, the macro economic outlook is problematic, vendor costs are high and climbing and security needs more investment every year. What on earth do we do??!! I know…. lets start a crusade – lets […]
Read more →Auto-Renew Let’s Encrypt Certs on Linux with Cron
If you want to automatically renew your certs then the easiest way is to setup a cron just to call letsencrypt periodically. Below is an example cron job: First create the bash script to renew the certificate Now enter the script in the following format into nano: Now edit the crontab to run the renew […]
Read more →IAM Policy to Enforce EBS Encryption on EC2 Instances
Here is a useful IAM conditional policy which will force EBS volumes to be encrypted when created by an EC2 instances.
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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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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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