Not “5 tips for AWS.” Long-form essays on real production problems we’ve hit, the trade-offs we made, and what we’d do differently. Written by Hassan, Maryam, and David — never ghost-written, always specific.
We’ve audited four Bedrock dependencies in the last twelve months. Every one of them grew its inference bill non-linearly — the trap isn’t the per-token price, it’s the compounding effect of unbounded usage, model upgrades, and prompt sprawl. This essay walks through the math, shows the real cost curve from a client engagement, and explains why the 9-month migration window matters more than the 73% savings number you’ll see in our case study.
Right-sizing, savings plans, and S3 lifecycle. That’s it. Across 47 engagements, these three categories account for roughly 80% of the recoverable waste we identify in every cost audit. Here’s the math on each, why they keep recurring, and which one to fix first based on your traffic shape.
Most engineering teams set SLOs in isolation: SRE picks “four nines because it sounds responsible” and product never sees the number. Six months later the rotation is burning out and the SLO sits unenforced in a runbook. Here’s what changes when product, support, and engineering set them together in the same room — and how to facilitate that workshop without it taking three weeks.
AWS account sprawl isn’t a technical problem. It’s a political one, and that’s why most migrations stall before they ship. This essay walks through a 9-week migration we ran for a Series B FinTech — not the Terraform side, but the eleven engineer interviews, the SOC 2 auditor conversations, and the one account we couldn’t close because of a vendor webhook hardcoded six years ago.
Our first essay, and our most-read. Discovery calls that are really qualification screens. Juniors shipping work that was sold by principals. Auto-renewing contracts. Sequenced emails from people you’ve never met. The industry has a credibility problem, and most firms make it worse by pretending otherwise. Here’s the structural decisions we made to avoid those failure modes — and the math that makes those decisions sustainable.
Same posts, organized by practice area. Useful if you’re searching for something specific or want to see the body of work under one of our four practice areas.
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