Insights & Resources

NIST CSF 2.0 on AWS: Govern + six functions, tiers, 800-53/171/CMMC. July 2026 Tier-3 checklist.

n8n on EKS: queue mode, RDS Postgres, Redis/Valkey, ALB+WAF, IRSA. July 2026 production checklist.

Amazon QuickSight can replace expensive BI tools or become a costly mistake, depending on how you use it. This production guide covers SPICE, multi-tenancy, cost control, and the cases where QuickSight is the wrong choice.

Virtual data modeling on AWS: Athena/Redshift semantic views without copies. As of July 2026, when VDM works and when it burns Athena dollars.

Kinesis Data Streams and Amazon MSK both handle real-time streaming on AWS, but they serve different architectures. This post covers how to choose between them for your workload.

Serverless RPUs vs Provisioned RA3 is still not an automatic call. July 2026 refresh: base 4 to 1024 RPUs, Max RPU-hours, AI-driven scaling, and when RI wins.

Amazon OpenSearch Service powers search, log analytics, and time-series workloads on AWS. This post covers the architecture patterns and cost levers that matter most in production.

An idle NAT Gateway in us-east-1 costs $36.50/month before any traffic: $32.85 in hours plus $3.65 for the public IPv4. A Regional NAT Gateway across three AZs still bills three hours, $109.50 idle.

Cheapest Spot pool is often the unstable one. July 2026: price-capacity-optimized + attribute-based selection, stability scoring, and interruption handling, before you chase $/hr.

The AWS observability team built a chaos engineering game on top of the official OTel Demo. It has 44 injected failures, three telemetry signals, and an LLM judge. This post covers what's inside.

Kinesis Data Streams combined with Lambda and DynamoDB is the simplest path to a real-time data pipeline on AWS. This post covers the architecture, code patterns, and operational guidance.

EMR Serverless vs EC2 vs EKS for Spark. July 2026 refresh: Spot limits, cold start, Iceberg on all three, and a decision matrix for intermittent vs 24/7 jobs.