re:Invent 2025: A Decade of Attending AWS's Biggest Event
After attending AWS re:Invent for a decade, reflections on how the conference, the cloud industry, and my own perspective have evolved
- cloud
- ai
Field notes
Ideas tested in public.
Essays on autonomous agents, systems architecture, technical leadership, and the work of making software dependable.
192 essays and countingFilter by subject
Multi-Cloud MCP: One Protocol to Manage Them All
Using MCP to create a unified interface for managing resources across AWS, GCP, and Azure, eliminating the cognitive overhead of cloud-specific CLIs and consoles
- mcp
- cloud
Next Portal: Building an Internal Developer Platform That Developers Actually Use
The architecture behind Next Portal, an open source internal developer platform built to reduce cognitive load rather than add another tool to the stack
- open-source
- cloud
re:Invent 2024: AWS Goes Agent-First
AWS re:Invent 2024 signals a fundamental shift: Amazon is rebuilding its cloud platform around AI agents as first-class citizens
- cloud
- ai
re:Invent 2023: Amazon Bedrock and the Enterprise GenAI Stack
AWS re:Invent 2023 puts generative AI at the center of Amazon's cloud strategy with Bedrock and new services
- cloud
- ai
re:Invent 2022: AWS Bets on Generative AI
AWS re:Invent this year revealed a clear strategic pivot toward generative AI infrastructure, and the cloud landscape is about to change
- cloud
Mastering Cloud Engineering: Published
My first book is published, distilling years of hands-on cloud architecture experience into a comprehensive guide
- books
- cloud
- career
re:Invent 2021: AWS and the $71 Billion Run Rate
AWS re:Invent just wrapped, and the numbers tell a story about cloud dominance that the industry cannot ignore
- cloud
re:Invent 2020: Virtual, Massive, and ECS Anywhere
AWS re:Invent went fully virtual and announced ECS Anywhere, extending container orchestration beyond the cloud and into any infrastructure you operate
- cloud
Terraform 0.13: Provider Requirements Done Right
Terraform 0.13 introduces proper provider source addresses and module-level provider requirements, fixing one of the most persistent pain points in infrastructure as code
- terraform
- cloud
Kubernetes 1.19: The Platform Is Mature
Kubernetes 1.19 extends the support window to one year and moves Ingress to GA, signaling that the platform has crossed from innovation to infrastructure
- kubernetes
- cloud
The World Went Remote Overnight
COVID-19 just forced the largest remote work experiment in human history, and cloud infrastructure is the only reason it is working at all
- cloud
- personal
re:Invent 2019: Outposts, EKS on Fargate, and the Hybrid Future
Key announcements from AWS re:Invent 2019, including Outposts general availability, EKS on Fargate, and what they mean for enterprise infrastructure
- cloud
- kubernetes
Containerizing Enterprise Java: From WAR to Docker
Patterns and pitfalls of containerizing legacy Java WAR applications running on JBoss and WebLogic
- cloud
- docker
The Rise of GitOps: ArgoCD and Flux
GitOps is changing how we think about Kubernetes deployments by making Git the single source of truth for cluster state
- cloud
- kubernetes
Tier-1 Commerce Payment Systems Migration
Migrating payment processing systems to the cloud while maintaining PCI compliance and zero downtime
- cloud
re:Invent 2018: Lambda Layers, Transit Gateway, and the Services That Matter
A practitioner's take on the AWS re:Invent 2018 announcements that will actually change how we build
- cloud
IAM Policies Deep Dive: Least Privilege at Enterprise Scale
Designing IAM policies, SCPs, and permission boundaries that enforce least privilege across hundreds of AWS accounts
- cloud
Lambda, RDS, Oracle on EC2: Hybrid Data Tier Patterns
Designing data tier architectures that bridge serverless Lambda functions with traditional Oracle databases on AWS
- cloud
Kubernetes vs ECS: An Enterprise Container Orchestration Comparison
When to choose Kubernetes and when to choose ECS, based on real experience operating both at enterprise scale
- kubernetes
- cloud
VPC Networking at Enterprise Scale
Designing VPC topologies, Transit Gateway patterns, peering strategies, and security group architectures for hundreds of AWS accounts
- cloud
Akamai-Fronted Web Applications on AWS
Designing enterprise web tier architecture with Akamai CDN in front of AWS origins, including WAF, origin shield, and caching strategies
- cloud
Active-Active Multi-Region Architecture with Route 53
Designing active-active multi-region deployments with Route 53 failover, health checks, and data replication strategies
- cloud
Storage Gateways, EFS, and AWS Batch: Solving Enterprise Storage Challenges
How we designed storage architectures for media workflows using EFS, AWS Batch, and Storage Gateway
- cloud