pinpole / blog

Engineering insights

Deep-dives on cloud architecture, pre-deployment simulation, FinOps, and AWS at scale — from the team building pinpole.

Engineering FinOps AWS
FinOps at design time: preventing cloud waste before it happens
Move cost visibility to where structural decisions are made — before a single resource is provisioned.
Cost modelling Design-time optimization
14 min read Read post →
EngineeringServerless
How we model Lambda cold-start behaviour under spike traffic
Rigorous, reproducible cold-start modelling before deployment — not after the incident.
March 2026 · 16 minRead →
EngineeringAWS
DynamoDB vs RDS: simulation-based cost & performance at 10K–1M RPS
Why database selection at scale needs simulation data, not assumptions.
March 2026 · 14 minRead →
EngineeringIaC
HCP Terraform free tier is gone — what AWS teams should do next
A practical migration path beyond swapping IaC platforms.
March 2026 · 15 minRead →
EngineeringAWS
DynamoDB vs Aurora: simulation-led selection
Compare Aurora and DynamoDB with traffic-shaped simulation before you commit.
2026Read →
FinOpsNetworking
The hidden cost of NAT Gateway: simulating egress patterns
Find the VPC endpoint break-even before NAT bills surprise you.
May 2026 · 7 minRead →
FinOpsS3
Why your S3 bill is 3× what you expected
Simulate request patterns, storage classes, and lifecycle transitions at design time.
2026Read →
EngineeringDatabase
Aurora Serverless v2 vs Provisioned: the crossover analysis
Where serverless Aurora wins — and where provisioned still dominates.
2026Read →
EngineeringDynamoDB
DynamoDB on-demand vs provisioned: the crossover analysis
Simulate RCU/WCU shapes to pick the right capacity mode.
2026Read →
EngineeringContainers
EKS vs ECS vs Lambda: simulation-led container platform selection
Compare orchestration overhead and burst behaviour before you standardise.
2026Read →
ServerlessLambda
Lambda cold-start mitigation in 2026
Provisioned concurrency, SnapStart, and architecture patterns — simulated.
2026Read →
EngineeringNetworking
ALB vs NLB vs API Gateway: load balancer simulation
Latency, cost, and feature trade-offs under real traffic shapes.
2026Read →
EngineeringCaching
CloudFront vs API Gateway vs ElastiCache caching
Simulate cache hit ratios and origin load before you pick a tier.
2026Read →
EngineeringEvents
SQS vs Kinesis vs EventBridge vs MSK: event-driven simulation
Throughput, ordering, and cost under bursty event workloads.
2026Read →
ServerlessOrchestration
Step Functions vs Lambda orchestration: a simulation
State transitions, retries, and billable steps — modelled pre-deploy.
2026Read →
EngineeringHA
Multi-AZ vs Multi-Region: simulating the real cost of HA
Replication, failover, and RTO targets with dollar figures attached.
2026Read →
EngineeringSpikes
Designing for traffic spikes: simulating Black Friday before it happens
Seasonal burst patterns on serverless and data tiers — without load tests in prod.
2026Read →
EngineeringProcess
The architecture review meeting is broken
Replace slide-deck opinions with simulation-backed cost and latency evidence before ARB sign-off.
May 2026 · 9 minRead →
EngineeringMigration
Monolith to microservices: simulating cost and latency before the rewrite
Decomposition scenarios with network hops and operational overhead included.
2026Read →
EngineeringSearch
OpenSearch vs DynamoDB Streams + Lambda: simulating search workloads
Index size, query rate, and pipeline cost compared with simulation.
2026Read →
FinOpsCompute
RI vs Savings Plans vs Spot: a simulation of commitment strategies
Model utilisation risk before you lock in a year of spend.
2026Read →
FinOpsNetworking
VPC endpoints, PrivateLink, Transit Gateway: simulating ROI
When private connectivity pays for itself — with numbers, not slides.
2026Read →
EngineeringShift-left
The real cost of not testing your architecture
Why post-deployment surprises happen — and how simulation changes the equation.
2026Read →

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