The Cloud Playbook

TCP #147: The Streaming Pipeline That Does Not Page You

Shard capacity, Firehose buffering, replay design, and the alarms that actually justify waking someone.

Oct 25 • Amrut Patil

TCP #146: Most Streaming Pipelines Answer a Question Nobody Asked

Five questions and a simple break-even test for choosing streaming or micro-batch per pipeline.

Oct 18 • Amrut Patil

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TCP #145: Athena Optimization, In the Order That Pays

Partition projection, Parquet economics, and the predicate mistakes that make partitioned tables scan in full.

Oct 11 • Amrut Patil

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TCP #144: Three Queries That Find Your Athena Cost Problem

Athena bills by bytes scanned. The attribution data exists, but most teams never turn it into an optimization queue.

Oct 4 • Amrut Patil

September 2026

TCP #142: ETL vs ELT Is Not a Platform-Wide Decision

Standardizing every pipeline on one pattern is how teams overpay for compute or create unnecessary latency.

Sep 20 • Amrut Patil

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TCP #141: Seven Signals Your Organization Is Not Ready for Data Mesh

Decentralizing data ownership before the platform exists produces silos with better branding.

Sep 13 • Amrut Patil

TCP #140: How to Keep Your AWS Data Lake From Becoming a Data Swamp

A Terraform reference pattern for controlling schema, ownership, partitioning, permissions, and cost before your serverless data lake becomes untrusted.

Sep 6 • Amrut Patil

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TCP #143: The Glue Job That Survives a Mid-Load Failure

Bookmarks, staging merges, late-arriving data, and recovery design for incremental S3-to-Redshift loads.

Sep 6 • Amrut Patil

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August 2026

TCP #139: The strangler fig that strangled nothing after 18 months

How to sequence which seam gets cut first, second, and third, so the pattern converges instead of stalling at two services forever.

Aug 16 • Amrut Patil

TCP #138: The rehost business case that was true in the slide deck

Three line items that turn a lift-and-shift savings story into a loss, and where each one hides until the first invoice.

Aug 9 • Amrut Patil

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TCP #137: The migration strategy meeting that never needed to be a meeting.

Four questions that sort any workload into rehost, replatform, refactor, repurchase, retain, or retire, before the debate starts.

Aug 1 • Amrut Patil

July 2026

TCP#136: You picked your secret store by cost. That was the wrong axis.

Secrets Manager, Parameter Store, and KMS-encrypted env compared on the axes that actually decide the right store per secret.

Jul 26 • Amrut Patil