Field Notes
Notes from the coalface
Things we've learned managing cloud infrastructure for UK businesses. Written by the engineers who do the actual work, not a content team.
Cost Control
When cloud costs stop making sense
AWS and Azure bills tend to grow in the background until someone notices the line item on a quarterly review. Here's how it usually happens, and what to look at first.
Migration
Moving to AWS without a plan is a plan — just a bad one
Most migration problems aren't technical. They're the result of decisions made too quickly at the start, before anyone fully understood what was being moved and why.
Operations
Self-managed cloud: what the calculator doesn't count
The infrastructure costs are visible. The engineering time, the on-call hours, the incident fatigue — those don't show up in the AWS console. A realistic comparison needs all of them.