AWS Cloud Architect & AI Expert
Autovacuum cannot keep up after Black Friday bulk deletes, and your BRIN index is not helping point lookups. This guide covers vacuum strategy on Aurora, plus Aurora Limitless and DynamoDB hot key mitigation.
Token buckets allow bursts and leaky buckets smooth traffic. WAF rate rules and API Gateway usage plans implement neither perfectly, but both matter for layered defense.
A full TLS handshake on every API call adds RTTs your p99 cannot afford. This guide walks through TLS 1.3 1-RTT handshakes and resumption, ACM cert rotation, and security policies on ALB and CloudFront.
Project Loom virtual threads help I/O-bound Java on ECS, not CPU-bound aggregation. Compare actor models, lock-free queues, and when Lambda concurrency beats pinning threads on EC2.
Control Tower gets you an org, but it does not tell you how many OUs you need or which policy type owns VPC public access. Since re:Invent 2024 you have four layers (SCP, RCP, declarative, and tag policies), and RCP coverage grew through Feb 2026 (DynamoDB). A composite 60-account enterprise cut exception SCP attachments from 14 ad-hoc to 3 time-boxed RFCs in two quarters by moving accounts out of "temporary" prod OUs.
On June 10, 2026 AWS made M9g/M9gd on Graviton5 generally available: up to 25% more compute vs M8g, and 35% faster for web and ML per AWS. Field guide to M9g vs M9gd, a canary checklist, RI traps, and agentic-AI fit. The compute-optimized siblings C9g/C9gd went GA June 30.
Your landing zone set up the org, OUs, and baseline SCPs. Then most teams stall, duplicating resources per account and wiring brittle cross-account role chains. Since re:Invent 2024 the toolkit changed: RCPs bound what can be done TO a resource (even by external principals), declarative policies enforce EC2/VPC/EBS config state that survives new APIs, and one Route 53 Profile can push DNS to up to 5,000 VPCs. This post has the mechanism-by-job decision matrix and a rollout order that avoids lockouts.
On September 1, 2026 AWS GA’d Claude Fable 5.1: 1M-token context, 128K output, Covered Model with 30-day retention. Fable 5 (June 9) remains the prior pin. This post covers the fit decision.
A composite mid-market manufacturer exited a colo of 150 workloads and ~400 TB in 21 months across 8 waves, with 47 minutes of unplanned cutover downtime (industry median per Gartner: ~4 hours per major cutover). The single-wave alternative bid came in at ~$4.8M; the wave-based program ran ~$2.1M. The post covers how the wave plan, dependency cutoff, and rollback layer fit together against a hard landlord deadline.
July 2026: EU Data Act switching charges hit zero by 12 Jan 2027; AWS free DTO-on-exit still requires Support approval and typically a 90-day move window. Exit cost is re-platform time (~$113k in our model), not the ~$4,400 egress line.
A stack of ALB + EC2 + RDS Multi-AZ + S3 composes to ~99.83% availability, so promising customers 99.9% is a check you cannot cash. This guide does the composition math, converts it to an error budget (99.9% = 43.2 min/month), and shows why AWS service credits never fund your SLA penalties.
July 2026: Barclays ~86% plan some repatriation; IDC ~8 to 9% full exit, and both are true. Per-workload placement beats multi-cloud-by-default. Includes a scored matrix and the daily tax of “just in case” portability.
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