Ilyas Hamdi

Projects

Sun, 26 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

About

Fri, 24 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

What I Do

I work with organizations to bring clarity to their cloud architecture, helping them understand what they have and what decisions they need to make. That might mean an architecture assessment that surfaces hidden risk, a security review that cuts through vendor noise, or a strategy engagement that helps a team align on a direction before they build in the wrong one. Where it makes sense, I help develop the path forward too, though the goal is always a decision you own, not a dependency on me.

Contact

Fri, 24 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The best conversations usually start before there is a defined project — when an organization is trying to figure out what questions to ask, what the real problem is, or whether a significant technology decision deserves more scrutiny before it gets made. If you’re at that point, I’d like to hear from you. I’m particularly interested in connecting with organizations navigating technology decisions that carry real weight.

The 100% reliability targets fallacy

Thu, 26 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

100% SLOs aren't just impractical. They're logically indefensible, and they corrode every reliability conversation that follows.

The AI build vs buy decision

Thu, 26 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Build vs buy in AI is downstream of organizational position, not upstream of it. The decision answered without that context is mostly noise.

When AI makes decisions about learners

Thu, 15 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Responsible AI in edtech needs the rigor of clinical or financial AI, plus a constraint those domains don't share: the population can't advocate for itself.

AI governance with no governance team

Tue, 09 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The lightweight version of AI governance: four artifacts, named owners across functions you already have, before implicit governance is the only kind you've got.

Monitoring at scale

Tue, 21 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The monitoring stack that worked at 50 services breaks at 500. Patterns that scale aren't bigger versions of the small ones. They're different patterns.

The error budget mindset

Tue, 22 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The mechanism is the easy part. The willingness to slow shipping when the budget is exhausted is the hard part, and the part most programs skip.

Shaping architecture with SLOs

Tue, 04 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

SLO-driven architecture treats the SLO as upstream of the design. If your SLO has never caused you to ship later, it isn't doing the work.

The cost of telemetry

Tue, 14 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Cardinality, retention, and query are the levers that decide what your team can know about the system, and how much knowing costs.

The implicit architecture of every modernization decision

Tue, 19 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Every modernization arrives with a stated goal and a much larger implicit one. The modernization that fails is the one where the implicit architecture was never named.

The three stages every IDP goes through

Tue, 15 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Most IDPs go through three painful stages: no users, wrong abstractions, and the moment someone realizes it has to be operated as a product.

Infrastructure security architecture patterns

Mon, 19 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000

A security pattern adopted without a threat model is a control with no clear job. The patterns aren't the problem. The application is.

Zero trust network architecture

Tue, 23 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Zero trust is one of the most successfully marketed architectural concepts of the decade. Most projects deliver better-than-perimeter, not actual zero trust.

What going containerized committed you to

Mon, 08 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Containers were sold on consistency. The bill arrived in installments: orchestration, networking, security, observability. An honest audit of what the decision bought.

SLO targets and observability maturity

Mon, 18 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

SLO targets need to match observability maturity, not a generic standard. Sometimes leveling up observability is the precondition, not a parallel track.

The IDP that helps, and the one that just adds overhead

Tue, 12 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

The difference between a useful IDP and a costly one is rarely the technology. It's the discipline of building for actual users and admitting what's not working.

What a cloud architecture review should produce

Thu, 26 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Most cloud architecture reviews produce a deck that gets filed. A useful review produces decisions framed for the people who can make them.

The security posture question most organizations ask too late

Mon, 14 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Four triggers force the question 'what's our security posture, actually?' Three are expensive. The fourth is the one to engineer for yourself.

When compliance becomes a substitute for security thinking

Tue, 23 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Compliance frameworks set a floor, not a ceiling. Treating them as the security strategy is how organizations end up audited and exploitable.

The postponed decision is now the risk

Wed, 08 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

The most expensive technology decisions are the postponed ones. They accumulate cost in places that don't show up as line items.

The architectural decisions hidden in a Dockerfile

Tue, 21 Feb 2023 00:00:00 +0000

A Dockerfile is six lines and a dozen architectural commitments. Most teams write them by copy-paste. Few read them as decisions.

CI/CD pipeline architecture for infrastructure

Thu, 08 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Application CI/CD is well-trodden. Infrastructure CI/CD is younger and stranger, and applying application patterns directly to it produces predictable failures.

IAM sprawl is access debt

Tue, 15 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000

IAM is the part of your cloud footprint that grows fastest and gets cleaned up the slowest. The result looks like a control and behaves like a liability.

What technical leaders get wrong communicating architecture upward

Thu, 22 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

The same architecture decision can be approved by one audience and rejected by another in the same quarter. Which document each was reading is the difference.

What a cross-account migration forces you to confront

Mon, 15 Aug 2022 00:00:00 +0000

A cross-account database move is the diagnostic, not the work. It surfaces architectural decisions you've been making implicitly for years.

IaC architecture at 5, 50, and 500 engineers

Tue, 14 Jun 2022 00:00:00 +0000

The shape of your IaC architecture is downstream of team size. Most pain comes from running yesterday's architecture at today's scale.

The four kinds of cloud architecture debt

Tue, 19 Apr 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Cloud architecture debt has four shapes: governance, operational, knowledge, optionality. Read the shape before you decide what to pay down.

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