Cloud Architecture

July 2026: Cognito user pools for SaaS — managed login vs classic hosted UI, pool vs silo tenancy, federation limits, and a checklist before you outgrow Cognito into Auth0/Okta.

DR plans look great in slide decks. They look different at 3am during a region failover. RTO/RPO targets, cost analysis, and the implementation patterns for backup-and-restore through pilot light, warm standby, and multi-site active-active.

A single AWS account is fine for week one. By month six, audit teams, security reviewers, and your CFO will all want their own boundary. How to structure AWS Organizations with Control Tower and a landing zone that doesn't have to be re-architected at scale.

Seven signs your AWS migration needs a partner — stalled timelines, unknown inventory, DMS pain, compliance, surprise bills. July 2026 refresh with MAP/MGN/DMA checkpoints.

Aurora is 5× faster than MySQL — until your workload is the one where it isn't. A workload-by-workload framework for picking RDS vs Aurora, with the price-per-IOPS math and the patterns where Aurora's cost doesn't pay back.

ElastiCache loses your AI chatbot's session memory at every node replacement. MemoryDB doesn't. A decision framework for when to pick MemoryDB over ElastiCache, OpenSearch Serverless, and S3 Vectors for AI workloads — with the latency math and the failure mode that forces the switch.

Aurora Limitless shards Aurora transparently to hundreds of millions of rows per second. Here's when it beats vertical scaling, how to pick shard keys, and the real cost trade-offs.

AWS Application Composer visualizes and generates CloudFormation and SAM templates, now with AI-assisted IaC generation. Here's where it fits in a Terraform/CDK toolchain.

Amazon EVS runs vSphere/NSX/vSAN natively on AWS bare metal. No VMware license renegotiation, no application changes, no VMC on AWS partnership. The 2025 VMware cloud migration path.