- Amazon AWS | AWS Architecture | Azure Architecture | Business Continuity | Cloud Native | Disaster Recovery | Microsoft Azure
Building a Practical Disaster Recovery Plan for Your First Cloud Project
I still remember the first “cloud” Disaster Recovery (DR) plan I reviewed back in 2012. The team assumed that because their app was running on AWS, it was magically invincible. “It’s in the cloud,” they said. “Amazon handles that.” Six months later, us-east-1 had a wobble, and that team spent 14 hours manually rebuilding databases…
- Amazon AWS | Cloud Native | Google Cloud Platform | Microsoft Azure | Modern Infrastructure | Tools Engineers Love
Think Like an Architect: The Field Guide to Cloud Egress and Data Gravity
When you’re designing for Day 2 operations, you quickly realize that data isn’t just heavy—it’s expensive to move. I’ve seen countless “cloud-native” projects hit a wall during the scaling phase because the architect assumed egress was a flat overhead. It isn’t. It’s a variable tax that scales with your success. To build like an engineer,…
Slicing the Veeam “API Tax”: A 2025 Architect’s Guide to Immutable Object Storage
When you’re designing a Veeam-to-Cloud architecture, the per-GB storage price is the “marketing number.” But for those of us building for Day 2 operations, the number that actually matters is the IOPS-to-Object ratio. I’ve seen too many architects treat S3 like a tape drive, only to be blindsided by a monthly bill where 40% of…
- Amazon AWS | AWS Architecture | Azure Architecture | Cloud Native | Google Cloud Platform | Infrastructure as Code (IaC) | Microsoft Azure | Tools Engineers Love
“Gap of Grief”: Why Your Terraform Code Fails on Day 1
The “Gap of Grief”: While cloud providers speed ahead with new features, infrastructure-as-code tools often carry a heavy load of legacy support, creating a measurable lag. I’ve been designing cloud infrastructures for over 15 years, and the story is always the same. You see a flashy announcement at re:Invent or Ignite—maybe it’s a new high-performance…
The Terraform “Wrapper Tax”: Why I Stopped Abstracting Multi-Cloud Modules
The dream of “Write Once, Run Anywhere” Infrastructure as Code has mutated into a nightmare of technical debt. It’s time to embrace verbose, native code. Around 2018, many of us in the DevOps space shared a collective dream. We believed that with enough clever Terraform coding, we could abstract away the underlying cloud provider completely….
Hybrid vs Multi‑Cloud in 2025: What Systems Engineers Actually Need to Know
By 2025, the boardroom debate about “moving to the cloud” is largely over. It has been replaced by the far more complex engineering reality of managing the resulting sprawl. The discussion around Hybrid vs Multi-Cloud in 2025 has gained traction as businesses seek optimal solutions for their infrastructure needs. Understanding Hybrid vs Multi-Cloud in 2025…
The “Lift and Shift” Cost Trap: A Sysadmin’s Guide to FinOps and Avoiding Cloud Sticker Shock
Introduction: The “Lift and Shift” Trap You’ve successfully migrated your first workload. The terraform applied cleanly, the latency looks good, and the boss is happy. Then, 30 days later, the first bill arrives. It’s 40% higher than your estimate. Welcome to the “Lift and Shift” trap. For traditional sysadmins, “capacity” was a sunk cost. If…
From Sysadmin to Cloud Engineer in 2025: The Definitive Skills Roadmap
Introduction: The Server Room is Evolving, Not Dying If you are a traditional systems administrator, you’ve likely felt the shift. The racking and stacking are decreasing; the API calls are increasing. The narrative that “sysadmins are obsolete” is false, but the reality is that the role is evolving rapidly into Platform and Cloud Engineering. Your…
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