Blog
Field notes from the cloud.
Case studies, deep dives, and engineering practice from the Ordinary Experts team.
Bedrock Agents in Production: Lessons from the Field
Six months of running Bedrock Agents in client production environments has taught us where they shine, where they fail, and what operational disciplines you need in place before turning them on.
Aurora DSQL Is GA: What We Found in Our Pilot
Aurora DSQL went GA on May 27, 2025. We've been running it in a pilot for a few months. Here's what held up, what surprised us, and how our recommendation has shifted since the March decision-framework post.
ECS, EKS, or Lambda in 2025: A Decision Framework
The 2020-era heuristics for choosing between ECS, EKS, and Lambda no longer hold. Fargate pricing has changed, ECS has closed feature gaps with EKS, and Lambda's payload limits keep loosening. Here's how we think about the choice today.
When Distributed SQL Is the Right Answer (and When It Isn't)
Aurora DSQL fills a real gap in the AWS database lineup, but distributed SQL isn't the right default. Here's the decision framework we use with clients to figure out where it fits.
Adding Amazon Q Developer to Your CodePipeline
A practical walk-through for putting Amazon Q Developer to work inside CodePipeline - reviewing CloudFormation diffs in pull requests, flagging IAM regressions, and where we draw the line between assistance and automation.
S3 Tables: Should You Migrate Your Data Lake?
S3 Tables is AWS's managed Apache Iceberg service. Whether to migrate depends on how much Iceberg operational work you're already doing, and how much of your stack is locked into Glue.
re:Invent 2024: A DevOps Engineer's Take
Cutting through the noise of re:Invent 2024: the five announcements we think actually matter for the day-to-day work of running production workloads on AWS.
Using Amazon Q Developer to Write CloudFormation
Amazon Q Developer is a useful pair-programmer for CloudFormation, but it has rough edges around recent API changes and IAM scoping. Here's how we've been integrating it into our IaC workflow.
Case Study: Firstech - Amazon Aurora Migration
Firstech is an award-winning maker of automotive electronics. As part of their marketing presence, Firstech hosted a collection of 11 microsites for marketing, customer management and support on Heroku. Ordinary Experts migrated these applications to AWS on Elastic Container Service using AWS Copilot. This solution consolidated the microsite’s infrastructure management and billing with Firstech’s primary product application on AWS, reduced hosting costs, ensured containerization best practices and expedited migration efforts.
New CONSUL DEMOCRACY AWS Marketplace Product
Ordinary Experts has launched CONSUL DEMOCRACY on AWS Marketplace: a seamless CloudFormation template and custom AMI, enabling easy deployment of production-ready CONSUL DEMOCRACY sites. Join the revolution now, with scalability, security, and cost-optimization on AWS.