Notes on data, AI, IT
and security
No marketing fog. The way I think about real problems with founders and managers.
When to split a monolith: the questions matter more than the hype
Microservices are a popular answer to the scaling question. But the right question is not 'split or not' - it is 'why and when'.
Event-driven architecture: what managers need to know before committing
Events and message queues solve real coordination problems between services. They also introduce complexity that is easy to underestimate from a project plan.
Cloud vendor lock-in: the tradeoffs that actually matter
Lock-in is not automatically bad. The question is whether you are trading flexibility for something you actually need, or just for a lower list price today.
The unexpected cloud bill: what companies discover a year after migration
Why cloud costs end up higher than projected - and what you can do before it becomes a problem.
API-first or integration spaghetti: the choice your architecture makes
Why the way your company's systems talk to each other determines growth speed and the cost of change.
Why cloud migrations run long: three systemic reasons
Cloud migrations almost always take longer than planned. Three causes I see consistently, and how to work with them.
API as a product: why internal integrations fall apart
How the approach to internal APIs affects the reliability of the whole architecture, and why an internal client deserves no less respect than an external one.
Feature flags in production: the promise and the maintenance debt
Feature flags let you ship safely and experiment cheaply - but every flag you add is a piece of logic you have to eventually remove.
Kubernetes for small business: when orchestration is overkill
Why complex infrastructure often slows small teams down, and how to match the level of complexity to the actual task.
COVID, remote work, and the sudden maturity of the digital workplace
The pandemic accomplished in a few months what corporate IT strategies had failed to do in years. What changed in the digital infrastructure of companies - and what will stick.
The cloud bill that arrived after the fast migration
Companies that rushed to the cloud under pandemic pressure are now receiving bills nobody planned for. Why this happens and what to do about it.
Business continuity after the pandemic: what to revisit in the architecture
What conclusions about IT architecture and operational resilience are worth drawing from the first wave - before normal routine returns.