Cloud

AI cloud subscriptions have fragmented into a crowded market. Frontier-lab APIs compete with open-weights challengers, consumer chat plans compete with agent platforms, and every provider is reshuffling model tiers every few months. This guide organizes the 2026 landscape so you can pick a plan without reading six pricing pages. For background on how these costs behave over time, see Token Economics: Why Costs Aren’t Going Down and Local vs Cloud AI in 2026. ...

Amazon Web Services recently introduced AWS S3 Files, a service that addresses a persistent challenge in cloud computing - how to give file-based applications direct access to object storage without duplicating data or building custom connectors. The Problem S3 Files Solves Traditionally, applications designed around file systems faced a difficult choice when working with Amazon S3: Use object APIs - Build custom integration code and refactor applications Duplicate data - Copy data between S3 and separate file systems, creating sync challenges and increased costs Accept performance trade-offs - Work with slower, network-dependent access patterns S3 Files eliminates these constraints by providing a native file system interface directly over S3 data. ...

Cheatsheets are one of the most under-rated learning tools in the DevOps toolbox. When you are three hours into debugging a broken pipeline, you don’t want a 400-page book - you want the one page that reminds you which flag does what. This page collects quick references I keep within arm’s reach. Cloud Computing A concise summary of the core cloud service models (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS), deployment patterns, and the shared responsibility model is a good starting point for anyone new to cloud infrastructure. ...

The AWS Summit London agenda for 2023 went live in mid-May, and the schedule shape will be familiar to anyone who has attended a Summit before - a morning keynote followed by parallel technical tracks, hands-on workshops, and partner sessions spread across the afternoon. What to expect AWS Summits are the free regional cousins of re:Invent. You lose the service-launch spectacle but gain something useful: the content is pitched at the realities of running AWS in your region, often with local customer case studies that simply would not make the Vegas keynote stage. ...

Good engineering blogs are one of the cheapest forms of mentorship available. The posts below are from teams and individuals I return to when I want to see how real organisations solve real problems - outages, scaling walls, migrations, and the occasional cultural mistake. Vendor and Platform Blogs These blogs publish architectural deep-dives and reference implementations. They are partly marketing, but the engineering detail is usually genuine. Atlassian DevOps Blog - practitioner posts on pipelines, incident response, and team topology AWS DevOps Blog - pipeline patterns, CDK/CodePipeline how-tos, and multi-account guidance Google Cloud Blog - the SRE-flavoured material that originated at Google Microsoft DevOps Blog - Azure DevOps, GitHub Actions, and developer platform posts GitLab Blog - CI/CD and platform engineering content from the GitLab team HashiCorp Blog - Terraform, Vault, Consul, and Nomad in production Individual and Community Voices Ricard Bejarano - SRE at Cisco with sharp posts on minimal container images and infrastructure hygiene Charity Majors - co-founder of Honeycomb, writing extensively on observability and on-call culture Julia Evans - illustrated explainers on Linux, networking, and debugging fundamentals Gergely Orosz - The Pragmatic Engineer - deep dives into how large engineering organisations actually operate High Scalability - architecture breakdowns of well-known systems SRE-Specific Reading Google SRE Books - the foundational texts on SRE as a discipline Increment Magazine - long-form essays on on-call, incident response, and reliability Everything DevOps (Reddit) - less polished, but a useful pulse on what practitioners are struggling with this week How I Use This List Blog posts age quickly. A Kubernetes best-practices post from 2019 may actively mislead you in 2026. When I read any of these, I check the date first and treat anything older than three years as historical context rather than current guidance. ...

“Monitoring” and “observability” are not the same thing, even though the words are often used interchangeably. Monitoring tells you when a pre-defined thing has gone wrong. Observability is whether you can answer new questions about system behaviour - including questions you had not thought to ask when you built the dashboards. This page groups tools by what they do rather than by vendor, because most real production stacks combine several of them. ...

Conferences are an inefficient way to learn a specific skill and an excellent way to discover what the rest of the industry is struggling with this year. The ones below are the events I either attend or watch closely, grouped by focus area. Large vendor conferences These are the flagship events run by the major cloud and software vendors. Content is partly marketing, but the architectural talks and customer case studies are genuinely useful. ...