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Steve Cole

📍 US / Colombia

You Moved to Kubernetes. Your CPU Utilization Is Still 10%.

I'm going hard today. Collating over 100 recent articles on the FinOps space and aggregating them down to a handful of select topics, this one stood out to me like a sore thumb, screaming for attention. This is going to be a bit longer than normal. Breaking News:

Shift Left. Build Right. Knock knock, Mr. Smith

I built a system at Adobe called Spot Stack. It was tiered infrastructure provisioned by Auto Scaling Groups (ASGs) that delivered EC2 resources to a pre-Kubernetes container platform. It managed capacity well, and did so at the lowest cost possible. Inevitably, Auto Scaling groups improved, rendering the system I built

Spot Is the Reward for Good Architecture

I've never been woken up at 2am because of Spot. That needs context, because without it, it sounds like a brag. I've been paged plenty. Or called. Pagers are a bit dated. You get the point. Editing configs on an HA pair that triggered immediately. A

AWS Auto Scaling Policies

Posted another video this week. It’s a double-continuation; it dives deeper on the previous video I posted and continues the FinOps thread I’ve been focussed on this month. Figured I’d post the transcript for those of you on United flights without headphones so you don’t get

AWS Says 30% Better Performance. That Number Needs a Denominator

AWS says Graviton4 delivers 30% better performance than comparable its previous generation. That number is real under the benchmark conditions AWS used to generate it. The more honest question is what “30% better performance” means for your workload under your traffic conditions. No spec sheet can answer that. The architectural

FinOps Shift Left: Ounce of Prevention, Pound of Cure

Build errors show up in your terminal in seconds. Cost errors show up in your budget four weeks later. By then the architectural decision that caused the overspend is three sprints old, merged, deployed, and running in production. You're not going back to change it. This is the

My Humble Pis

Eight Raspberry Pis ran continuously for five years powering Monte Carlo trading simulations, evolutionary neural network race cars, and a headless AI agent swarm. A practical look at small-scale distributed systems, orchestration tradeoffs, and what simple hardware can teach about scale.

Smart AI Usage for Businesses: A Cost-Focused Guide

A good friend of mine once said to me "like it or not, AI is here to stay." He couldn't have been more correct. It's almost impossible to have a business conversation lately with the topic coming up. Massive enterprises are downsizing to reduce

The Last Ad-Free Frontier

I woke up this morning, made coffee, and sat down at my balcony overlooking the tranquil Andes here in Quindio; hell, for all I know the coffee I’m drinking was grown directly across the valley in clear view every morning. You can’t blame me for smiling. Over the

AWS Auto Scaling Groups

No blog this week, just a 2 minute high level video of this absolute monster of a feature that so many seem unfamiliar with. If you run compute workloads at AWS and you’re not using this, you should. FinOps at its finest. Performance, resilience, and cost optimization in one