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Long-form · not listicles

Essays from the engineers running the work.

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 M. Talha, Maryam, Hassan, and David — never ghost-written, always specific.

10
Essays published
~18m
Avg read time
4
Engineer authors
Latest essays

Nine more, in reverse chronological order.

What an honest discovery call sounds like
June 2026 ~1 min
Industry & Practice
What an honest discovery call sounds like
June 2026 Essay

What an honest discovery call sounds like

The first call should reduce uncertainty for both sides, even if the answer is that you should not hire us.

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The consulting proposal should name the engineer
June 2026 ~1 min
Industry & Practice
The consulting proposal should name the engineer
June 2026 Essay

The consulting proposal should name the engineer

A proposal without the person doing the work is not a plan. It is inventory management dressed up as strategy.

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Account boundaries that survive your next audit
June 2026 ~1 min
Cloud Infrastructure
Account boundaries that survive your next audit
June 2026 Essay

Account boundaries that survive your next audit

Good AWS account structure is boring, explicit, and understandable to both engineers and auditors.

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Alert quality is a product of ownership, not tooling
June 2026 ~1 min
Reliability
Alert quality is a product of ownership, not tooling
June 2026 Essay

Alert quality is a product of ownership, not tooling

Pager noise rarely starts in PagerDuty. It starts when nobody owns the difference between symptoms and user impact.

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June 2026 ~1 min
Cost Optimization
Reservation math after the architecture fix
June 2026 Essay

Reservation math after the architecture fix

Savings Plans help only after the workload is shaped correctly. Buy commitments too early and you lock in the waste.

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Right-sizing LLM inference: a three-tier approach
June 2026 ~2 min
AI Infrastructure
Right-sizing LLM inference: a three-tier approach
June 2026 Essay

Right-sizing LLM inference: a three-tier approach

You do not need GPT-4 for every request. Most production AI bills are paying for the difference.

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Multi-region failover is harder than the AWS docs say
June 2026 ~2 min
Cloud Infrastructure
Multi-region failover is harder than the AWS docs say
June 2026 Essay

Multi-region failover is harder than the AWS docs say

Active-passive sounds simple until you actually run a failover under production load. Five things the docs gloss over.

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On-call ergonomics: three numbers beyond page volume
June 2026 ~2 min
Reliability
On-call ergonomics: three numbers beyond page volume
June 2026 Essay

On-call ergonomics: three numbers beyond page volume

On-call is not just about page count. Three other knobs matter more for whether your rotation is sustainable.

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The cost-curve trap: when AWS spend grows 6× faster than users
June 2026 ~2 min
Cost Optimization
The cost-curve trap: when AWS spend grows 6× faster than users
June 2026 Essay

The cost-curve trap: when AWS spend grows 6× faster than users

Most companies measure cost per user. The number that actually matters is the slope of the cost curve relative to the slope of the user curve.

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