https://ilyashamdi.com/writing/Recent content in Writing on Ilyas HamdiHugo -- gohugo.ioenThu, 26 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://ilyashamdi.com/writing/slo-100-percent-fallacy/Thu, 26 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://ilyashamdi.com/writing/slo-100-percent-fallacy/100% SLOs aren't just impractical. They're logically indefensible, and they corrode every reliability conversation that follows.https://ilyashamdi.com/writing/ai-build-vs-buy/Thu, 26 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://ilyashamdi.com/writing/ai-build-vs-buy/Build vs buy in AI is downstream of organizational position, not upstream of it. The decision answered without that context is mostly noise.https://ilyashamdi.com/writing/ai-edtech-learners/Thu, 15 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://ilyashamdi.com/writing/ai-edtech-learners/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.https://ilyashamdi.com/writing/ai-governance-without-team/Tue, 09 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000https://ilyashamdi.com/writing/ai-governance-without-team/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.https://ilyashamdi.com/writing/monitoring-infrastructure-architecture-at-scale/Tue, 21 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000https://ilyashamdi.com/writing/monitoring-infrastructure-architecture-at-scale/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.https://ilyashamdi.com/writing/error-budget-management-infrastructure/Tue, 22 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000https://ilyashamdi.com/writing/error-budget-management-infrastructure/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.https://ilyashamdi.com/writing/slo-driven-infrastructure-architecture/Tue, 04 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000https://ilyashamdi.com/writing/slo-driven-infrastructure-architecture/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.https://ilyashamdi.com/writing/infrastructure-telemetry-architecture/Tue, 14 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000https://ilyashamdi.com/writing/infrastructure-telemetry-architecture/Cardinality, retention, and query are the levers that decide what your team can know about the system, and how much knowing costs.https://ilyashamdi.com/writing/implicit-architecture-modernization/Tue, 19 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000https://ilyashamdi.com/writing/implicit-architecture-modernization/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.https://ilyashamdi.com/writing/platform-engineering-internal-developer-platforms/Tue, 15 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000https://ilyashamdi.com/writing/platform-engineering-internal-developer-platforms/Most IDPs go through three painful stages: no users, wrong abstractions, and the moment someone realizes it has to be operated as a product.https://ilyashamdi.com/writing/infrastructure-security-architecture-patterns/Mon, 19 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000https://ilyashamdi.com/writing/infrastructure-security-architecture-patterns/A security pattern adopted without a threat model is a control with no clear job. The patterns aren't the problem. The application is.https://ilyashamdi.com/writing/zero-trust-network-architecture/Tue, 23 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000https://ilyashamdi.com/writing/zero-trust-network-architecture/Zero trust is one of the most successfully marketed architectural concepts of the decade. Most projects deliver better-than-perimeter, not actual zero trust.https://ilyashamdi.com/writing/containerized-actual-commitment/Mon, 08 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000https://ilyashamdi.com/writing/containerized-actual-commitment/Containers were sold on consistency. The bill arrived in installments: orchestration, networking, security, observability. An honest audit of what the decision bought.https://ilyashamdi.com/writing/slo-targets-observability-maturity/Mon, 18 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000https://ilyashamdi.com/writing/slo-targets-observability-maturity/SLO targets need to match observability maturity, not a generic standard. Sometimes leveling up observability is the precondition, not a parallel track.https://ilyashamdi.com/writing/idp-overhead/Tue, 12 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000https://ilyashamdi.com/writing/idp-overhead/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.https://ilyashamdi.com/writing/cloud-architecture-review-output/Thu, 26 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000https://ilyashamdi.com/writing/cloud-architecture-review-output/Most cloud architecture reviews produce a deck that gets filed. A useful review produces decisions framed for the people who can make them.https://ilyashamdi.com/writing/security-posture-too-late/Mon, 14 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000https://ilyashamdi.com/writing/security-posture-too-late/Four triggers force the question 'what's our security posture, actually?' Three are expensive. The fourth is the one to engineer for yourself.https://ilyashamdi.com/writing/compliance-vs-security-substitute/Tue, 23 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000https://ilyashamdi.com/writing/compliance-vs-security-substitute/Compliance frameworks set a floor, not a ceiling. Treating them as the security strategy is how organizations end up audited and exploitable.https://ilyashamdi.com/writing/postponed-technology-decision/Wed, 08 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000https://ilyashamdi.com/writing/postponed-technology-decision/The most expensive technology decisions are the postponed ones. They accumulate cost in places that don't show up as line items.https://ilyashamdi.com/writing/dockerfile-architectural-decisions/Tue, 21 Feb 2023 00:00:00 +0000https://ilyashamdi.com/writing/dockerfile-architectural-decisions/A Dockerfile is six lines and a dozen architectural commitments. Most teams write them by copy-paste. Few read them as decisions.https://ilyashamdi.com/writing/cicd-pipeline-architecture-infrastructure/Thu, 08 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000https://ilyashamdi.com/writing/cicd-pipeline-architecture-infrastructure/Application CI/CD is well-trodden. Infrastructure CI/CD is younger and stranger, and applying application patterns directly to it produces predictable failures.https://ilyashamdi.com/writing/iam-sprawl-access-debt/Tue, 15 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000https://ilyashamdi.com/writing/iam-sprawl-access-debt/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.https://ilyashamdi.com/writing/communicating-architecture-upward/Thu, 22 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000https://ilyashamdi.com/writing/communicating-architecture-upward/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.https://ilyashamdi.com/writing/cross-account-migration-confronts/Mon, 15 Aug 2022 00:00:00 +0000https://ilyashamdi.com/writing/cross-account-migration-confronts/A cross-account database move is the diagnostic, not the work. It surfaces architectural decisions you've been making implicitly for years.https://ilyashamdi.com/writing/iac-architecture-patterns/Tue, 14 Jun 2022 00:00:00 +0000https://ilyashamdi.com/writing/iac-architecture-patterns/The shape of your IaC architecture is downstream of team size. Most pain comes from running yesterday's architecture at today's scale.https://ilyashamdi.com/writing/cloud-architecture-debt/Tue, 19 Apr 2022 00:00:00 +0000https://ilyashamdi.com/writing/cloud-architecture-debt/Cloud architecture debt has four shapes: governance, operational, knowledge, optionality. Read the shape before you decide what to pay down.