ECS is "AWS-native containers." EKS is "Kubernetes, but you're still on the hook for everything Kubernetes." A decision guide for picking between ECS and EKS based on team Kubernetes experience, operational complexity, and the cost gap at production scale.
Step Functions is the AWS service most teams under-use until they need it badly. Patterns for sequential pipelines, parallel fan-out, error handling, human approval workflows, and the cost optimisations that keep state-transition bills predictable.
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.
Single-table design is either DynamoDB's superpower or a six-month rewrite waiting to happen. SaaS access patterns, tenant isolation, GSI strategies, and the patterns that make DynamoDB the right serverless database for multi-tenant apps — plus the patterns that get teams in trouble.
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.
Provisioned Concurrency is the most over-prescribed Lambda config in production. The break-even is a single equation — and most workloads sit on the wrong side of it. Memory tuning, Graviton savings, and the request-rate threshold where reserved capacity stops being a tax.
S3 + Glue + Athena is the canonical AWS data-lake stack. It's also the one teams over-engineer the fastest. A reference architecture with the partitioning scheme, the Glue crawler config, and the Athena cost guardrails that keep query bills predictable as the lake grows.
"We'll just have our developers manage AWS" is one of the most expensive decisions an engineering leader can make. A line-item TCO breakdown of in-house operations vs an AWS managed services provider for organizations from 10 to 500 engineers — including the costs that don't show up on the AWS bill.
Some teams ship AWS migrations clean. Most blow Q4 deadlines and a budget cycle. Seven signs you're heading for the second outcome — and the inflection points where bringing in a partner stops costing money and starts saving it.
Silo, pool, or bridge isolation isn't an architecture decision — it's a unit-economics decision you'll spend three years living with. A comparison framework for SaaS multi-tenancy on AWS, with the per-tenant cost trade-offs across scale tiers and the migration path for teams who picked wrong the first time.
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.
AWS Clean Rooms lets two companies analyze combined data without either seeing the other's raw records. Complete guide to collaboration setup, analysis templates, and compliance evidence for GDPR and SOC 2.
