Cloud, DevOps & Infrastructure
Field notes on AWS at scale: multi-account guardrails, platform engineering with small teams, SecOps consolidation, and disaster recovery you have tested.
Field notes from running AWS for a regulated fintech: multi-account guardrails with a small platform team, cluster autoscaling, WAF in the agent era, consolidating SecOps telemetry, and ransomware recovery that starts with backups you've actually tested. The through-line is small-team leverage: platform engineering that lets a few people run a lot of infrastructure safely.
18 posts, newest first
Ransomware Recovery: A Tested-Backups Problem
Everyone has backups. Almost nobody has a restore they've actually run under fire. That gap is where ransomware turns a bad week into an existential one.
Guardrails at Scale for a Three-Person Team
A lean team can govern a sprawling cloud estate without becoming a ticket queue, but only if you put the rules in the pipeline, not in your inbox.
Internal IT as a Product, or Shadow IT Wins
Internal platforms fail when run like monopolies. Give them product managers, roadmaps, honest adoption metrics, and let users defect to better tools.
WAF in the Agent Era: Good Bots vs. Abuse
Agents are now real customers hitting your edge with real economics. The old bot question (human or machine?) is the wrong one. Here's the one that matters.
Consolidate SecOps on OCSF, Not Aggregators
Dashboard sprawl isn't a tooling gap you fix with more tooling. It's a schema problem. Standardize on OCSF and the single pane of glass becomes real.
Cluster Autoscaler to Karpenter: What Breaks
Karpenter is the right call for most EKS shops, but the migration breaks things unrelated to autoscaling. What to know before flipping the switch.
Autonomous Pentesting in a Regulated Shop
A tool that scans and exploits your estate on its own schedule is a gift and a loaded gun. The scoping, approvals, and evidence I'd want before it runs.
AWS Cost Levers That Moved the Needle
Cutting ~35% off a multi-region AWS footprint with no capability loss: the levers in the order they paid back, best first.
The Eight-Domain Azure Security Review
A tool scores your Azure posture; an assessor walks your architecture. The eight domains I review, in audit order, and the evidence each has to produce.
Zero-Downtime Database Changes Are a Process
Blue/green and serverless Aurora don't make migrations safe. The runbook does. The boring discipline that keeps schema changes from becoming incidents.
Aurora DSQL for the Ledger: Active-Active
Multi-region active-active sounds like the answer to ledger nightmares. Interrogate the consistency, recovery math, and migration before betting the books.
Fine-Grained Authorization for Fintech APIs
Authorization scattered across your codebase isn't a feature. It's a liability you can't prove. The pattern multi-tenant regulated platforms actually need.
MCP Is a New Attack Surface: An IAM Playbook
Every MCP server is a new identity reaching into your cloud. Whether that's leverage or liability comes down to least-privilege IAM on every tool call.
An SBOM Nobody Reads Is Compliance Cosplay
Generating a software bill of materials is the easy part. Wiring it into the moment a change ships is where supply-chain security stops being theater.
Warm Standby Is a Promise You Have to Test
A DR plan you have never exercised is a hypothesis with a logo on it. Warm standby only counts as a promise if you test the failover before you need it.
Security and DevOps Under One Roof
The case for running security and DevOps as one mandate: org-chart distance doesn't create security, and owning the pipelines changes how you protect them.
Post-Close Cyber Integration: A 100-Day Plan
The post-close decade is decided in the first 100 days. The eight cyber controls to ship by day 30, and the identity-sprawl audit every exit diligence will run.
Cloud FinOps: Where 25-40% of Spend Hides
The press-release version of cloud savings cancels workloads and books compliance debt. The durable version is commitment management and SaaS rationalization.