Blog — pinpole

Engineering FinOps AWS

FinOps at design time: preventing cloud waste before it happens

FinOps is built almost entirely on looking backwards. But by the time an architecture reaches Cost Explorer, the structural decisions that determine 80% of its cost are already locked in. This is how to move cost visibility to where the real decisions happen — before a single resource is provisioned.

Cost modelling Architecture decisions AWS Cost Explorer Design-time optimisation

14 min read

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Engineering Serverless

How we model Lambda cold-start behaviour under spike traffic

There is a category of AWS incident I call the "everything looked fine in testing" failure. This post covers how to model Lambda cold-start dynamics before a single resource is provisioned — and make that modelling rigorous and reproducible.

AWS Lambda Cold starts Spike traffic

March 2026 · 16 min read Read →

Engineering AWS

AWS DynamoDB vs RDS: a simulation-based cost and performance comparison at 10K, 100K, and 1M RPS

You cannot assume your way through database selection at scale. The cost and performance implications between DynamoDB and RDS diverge dramatically with traffic profile — and are nearly impossible to reason about without simulation data.

DynamoDB RDS Cost comparison

March 2026 · 14 min read Read →

Engineering IaC

HCP Terraform free tier is gone — what AWS teams should do next

IBM's acquisition of HashiCorp and the HCP Terraform free tier sunset create a specific, time-limited window to rethink the entire AWS infrastructure design workflow — not just swap IaC platforms.

Terraform HCP Terraform OpenTofu IaC migration

March 2026 · 15 min read Read →

Engineering insights

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