Tag: aws
All the articles with the tag "aws".
The four weeks I spent not doing my job
Another semi-management story. On an AWS ProServe engagement, a big four partner had already owned the project for six months, and they wanted us nowhere near the real work. My first instinct was to push for a seat at the decision-making table, and that instinct was the problem. Here is what four weeks of deliberately not doing my job cost, the technical debt I watched pile up, and why the trust-building turned out to be the work itself.
The Kubernetes cluster that had to survive the open ocean
A pre-sale asked for Kubernetes in the server room of a cruise ship. The ship is a distraction. The real constraint is that the network becomes a scheduled resource, present in port and gone at sea, and that splits the system into a runtime that has to survive for days with no link home and a lifecycle of updates and image pulls that can only happen while the ship is connected. EKS Anywhere runs the whole cluster on the boat, which is why it fit and why keeping the control plane onshore would not have.
The lift-and-shift that took six months
On paper it was the simplest kind of cloud migration: move one third-party server to a VM in AWS, same software, newer version. It took six months. The move was never the problem. The software assumed an environment that has mostly disappeared, the vendor who alone was allowed to install it couldn't operate the OS it ran on, and everything an operable system needs (readable logs, a health signal, automatic recovery) had to be built from the outside, around a box we weren't allowed to open.
The 502 nobody could find
A legacy app served through a chain of gateways was throwing intermittent 502s to hundreds of call-center agents. A CIO escalation had run for two months with nobody able to say which component was failing. I joined as the new architect, tried to trace it the way everyone else had, hit the same wall, and concluded the wall was the point: stop hunting the fault, start removing components until it has nowhere to hide. This is that story, the identity provider being misused as a gateway underneath it all, and the two-stage design that shipped.
Reading what the customer actually wrote
The classifier I wrote about earlier was the last step in a longer pipeline. Before you can route a support request you have to read it, and reading it means extracting text, stripping signatures, translating HTML, detecting sentiment. Every one of those leans on a managed AWS service, and every one of those services quietly does the wrong thing on real customer mail. Here are four traps, each with a screenshot or a workaround, and the through-line that connects them.
Designing agentic AI on Bedrock, a real-world journey
A support-ticket classifier that started as one enormous prompt costing $145k a year, went through a pile of overbuilt architectures, and ended as a deterministic pipeline with no agent in it at all, costing $744. Here's every wrong turn and what actually broke.
Quantum computing, from someone who has to stay skeptical
I worked on a quantum computing platform. Here's the honest version of what quantum can and can't do today, and what it costs to run a real circuit yourself.