War stories from production, deep dives into infrastructure, and things we learned the hard way.
FinOps is broken not because the data doesn't exist, but because it lives in Cost Explorer and nobody opens it. We built an AI agent you chat with in plain English — ask what your NAT Gateway costs, which EC2 instances are oversized, or where last month's anomaly came from.
Eight microservices on EKS, CloudWatch logs with no trace IDs, and a 45-minute MTTD on every payment incident. We instrumented the full stack with OpenTelemetry Collector, Grafana Tempo, and auto-instrumentation — and found an N+1 query that had been adding 200ms to every payment for months.
A fast-growing DeFi startup brought us in to harden their stack before a Series A. We found the typical patterns of a team that prioritized shipping over security — exposed credentials in CI, permissive network rules, and a few blockchain-specific gaps. Here's every finding and every fix.
We built an autonomous SRE agent that connects to Datadog, Kubernetes, AWS, and Cloudflare simultaneously — then gave it RAG access to every runbook, post-mortem, and line of source code the company ever wrote. MTTR dropped from 45 minutes to 8. Here's the architecture.
In high-traffic news environments, traffic arrives in seconds and Cluster Autoscaler reacts in minutes. The only way out is to pre-scale before the spike — using the editorial CMS as your signal. Here's the full pattern: CMS webhooks, KEDA, and Karpenter.
We replaced Cluster Autoscaler with Karpenter, moved 80% of workloads to Spot, and implemented scale-to-zero for non-critical services. Monthly bill went from $47K to $14K.
We built an AI agent that reads logs, correlates traces, and suggests fixes before the on-call engineer finishes their coffee. Here's exactly how we did it.
We built a real-time cost visibility dashboard with Grafana, Prometheus, and custom exporters. Now every team sees exactly what they spend — and they started caring.
A healthcare SaaS was spending $38K/month on AWS with no idea where the money went. We audited everything, implemented 12 changes, and brought it down to $18K. Here's the full breakdown.