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Insights
Things I keep telling people.
Short, practical reads on cloud cost, security and compliance, written from doing the work rather than marketing it. More arrive when something annoys me enough to write it down.
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The five lines on your AWS bill that are usually wrong
After years of reading other people's invoices, the same five culprits show up almost every time. Check yours against the list.
Read → Cost · 3 minWhy I do savings plans last
Committing to a bad architecture just makes the waste cheaper. The order of operations matters more than the discount.
Read → Compliance · 5 minISO 27001 for a fifteen-person startup
You don't need a compliance team, a GRC platform, or a thousand pages of policy. Here's what you actually need.
Read → Security · 4 minFive security mistakes I keep finding in startup AWS accounts
None of them need budget to fix. All of them need someone to own them. The same five, almost every account.
Read → Resilience · 3 minYour backups probably don't work. Here's the ten-minute test
Five questions about your most important system. If you can't answer all five, you don't have backups. You have hope.
Read → Migration · 4 minThe real cost of the server nobody wants to touch
"It still works" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence. What legacy infrastructure actually costs, and how to leave quietly.
Read → Hiring · 4 minWhen to hire your first platform engineer (and when not to)
The signals it's genuinely time, the expensive ways founders get it wrong, and the middle options nobody mentions.
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