Cloud Insights & Best Practices

Expert guidance on cloud strategy, migration, security, and optimization

FinOps

Tagging Strategies That Actually Work for Cost Allocation

A comprehensive guide to implementing AWS resource tagging for accurate cost allocation, chargeback, and showback. Learn proven tagging schemas, enforcement automation, and strategies that scale from startups to enterprises.

Zachary Kann
FinOpsAWSCost Optimization+5 more
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Strategy

The ROI of Platform Engineering: Is Backstage Worth the Hype?

Platform engineering promises developer productivity gains, but building an Internal Developer Platform costs $500K-$2M annually. This analysis breaks down the true ROI of Backstage and custom IDPs—when the investment pays off, when it's premature optimization, and how to measure success beyond vanity metrics.

Zak Kann
Platform EngineeringBackstageInternal Developer Platform+4 more
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Security

How to Rotate AWS IAM Access Keys Automatically with Lambda

Stale IAM access keys are a top security risk—90+ day old keys significantly increase breach exposure. Learn how to build an automated key rotation system using Lambda, EventBridge, Secrets Manager, and SES that detects aging keys, notifies users, auto-rotates after grace periods, and maintains audit trails for compliance.

Zak Kann
AWSIAMLambda+4 more
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Cost Optimization

How to Cut Your AWS RDS Bill by 40% Without Downtime

AWS RDS costs spiral as you scale due to over-provisioned instances, underutilized storage, and expensive backup strategies. This guide provides proven tactics to reduce RDS costs by 40%+ through right-sizing, Graviton migration, Reserved Instances, storage optimization, and Aurora Serverless for non-production workloads—all without downtime.

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Strategy

When to Fire Your MSP and Build an In-House DevOps Team

Managed Service Providers work for early-stage startups but become velocity bottlenecks at scale. Learn the financial break-even point, warning signs your MSP is slowing you down, how to calculate true total cost of ownership, and a phased transition plan to build an in-house DevOps team without disrupting operations.

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Infrastructure as Code

Terraform State Locking: How DynamoDB Saves You from Corruption

Concurrent Terraform operations without state locking cause corruption, lost changes, and infrastructure drift. Learn how DynamoDB state locking prevents race conditions, how to configure S3 + DynamoDB backends, recover from failed locks, and implement force-unlock safely with audit trails.

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Infrastructure as Code

Structuring Terraform for Scale: Monorepo vs. Polyrepo

How you organize Terraform code determines your team's velocity at scale. This guide compares monorepo and polyrepo strategies with real-world examples, analyzes the trade-offs for teams of 2-50 engineers, and provides decision frameworks and migration paths for both approaches.

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Architecture

Centralized Logging Pattern: Shipping CloudWatch Logs to OpenSearch

CloudWatch Logs works for small workloads but becomes expensive and limited at scale. Learn how to build a production-grade centralized logging pipeline using Kinesis Data Firehose, OpenSearch, and Lambda for transformation—with cost analysis, query patterns, retention strategies, and monitoring.

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Cost Optimization

Spot Instances for Production? A Risk/Reward Analysis

AWS Spot Instances offer 70-90% cost savings but come with interruption risk. This guide analyzes real-world production use cases, interruption patterns, architectural strategies for handling spot terminations, and a decision framework for when spot instances are worth the operational complexity.

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