Blog
Field notes from the cloud.
Case studies, deep dives, and engineering practice from the Ordinary Experts team.
Self-Hosting WordPress on AWS: Three Architectures Compared
We've helped clients run WordPress on AWS in three distinct architectures: Lightsail for simplicity, our marketplace pattern for production workloads, and fully custom designs for the largest sites. Here's an honest comparison of where each fits.
re:Inforce 2025: The Boring Security Wins
re:Inforce is where the unglamorous, load-bearing security improvements get announced. Here are the four updates from this year that we think are worth your team's attention.
GitOps with CloudFormation: How We Run It
GitOps usually gets discussed in the context of Kubernetes. We've been running a GitOps approach with CloudFormation for years across our marketplace patterns and client engagements - here's the structure that works.
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.