Expert insights on cloud development, MVP creation, and modern software architecture from Concept to Cloud https://concepttocloud.com en-us Thu, 27 Aug 2026 18:02:00 GMT https://concepttocloud.com/news/what-to-use-instead-of-aws-qldb https://concepttocloud.com/news/what-to-use-instead-of-aws-qldb AWS quietly killed Quantum Ledger Database, and its own migration advice points at Postgres. Here's the append-only, audit-grade ledger we actually build there, what you get for free, and the one thing you have to add back by hand. Tue, 25 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT Cloud Architecture https://concepttocloud.com/news/zero-cve-go-chainguard-images https://concepttocloud.com/news/zero-cve-go-chainguard-images Most container vulnerabilities have nothing to do with your code, they come from the base image. Here's the migration I reach for: rebuild a normal Go service on Chainguard Images and watch the CVE count fall to near zero, plus the friction most tutorials skip. Tue, 14 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT Supply Chain Security https://concepttocloud.com/news/ai-briefing-orbital-data-centres https://concepttocloud.com/news/ai-briefing-orbital-data-centres This week's AI Briefing: an Altman, Musk exchange about SpaceX being worth more than the planet turned into the more interesting question underneath it, can you actually run AI inference in orbit, and does the maths close? Not yet, and here's why. Mon, 13 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT Cloud Architecture https://concepttocloud.com/news/enigma-investigation-platform-saiku-ossie https://concepttocloud.com/news/enigma-investigation-platform-saiku-ossie We keep telling clients their AI project is really a data project, and that with the right semantic layer underneath, everything on top gets fast and cheap to build. So we proved it. Over a weekend we pointed Saiku and Ossie at 45 million companies of public beneficial-ownership data and built seven investigation tools on top: a live ownership graph, dashboards, a risk radar, cross-border flows, plain-English querying and a case desk. One model underneath; every surface almost free. Here's what each piece does and how they fit. Sun, 12 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT Strategy https://concepttocloud.com/news/build-vs-buy-sanctions-screening https://concepttocloud.com/news/build-vs-buy-sanctions-screening The right answer is almost never pure build or pure buy. It is a hybrid, and the way you draw the line determines whether your platform survives an OFAC audit and whether the vendor bill stops eating your budget. Thu, 09 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT RegTech & Compliance https://concepttocloud.com/news/operating-partners-technology-playbook https://concepttocloud.com/news/operating-partners-technology-playbook How PE operating partners should think about technology as a value-creation lever. What to read in diligence, what to do in the first 100 days, what to leave alone during hold, and what to fix before exit. Thu, 09 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT Private Equity https://concepttocloud.com/news/how-to-improve-llm-uptime https://concepttocloud.com/news/how-to-improve-llm-uptime Most LLM outages are not caused by the model. They are caused by the pipeline around the model. The retries, the routing, the fallbacks, the rate limits, the observability. A concrete playbook for hitting three-nines on an LLM-powered product. Wed, 08 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT AI Engineering https://concepttocloud.com/news/multi-cloud-is-usually-overkill https://concepttocloud.com/news/multi-cloud-is-usually-overkill Multi-cloud promises resilience but usually delivers doubled cost and complexity for an outage that may never come. A look at the DNS trap, AWS's 300+ SLAs, the October 2025 US-EAST-1 outage, and why multi-region discipline beats a second provider. Mon, 06 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT Cloud Architecture https://concepttocloud.com/news/aws-summit-dc-the-ai-tag-isnt-a-strategy https://concepttocloud.com/news/aws-summit-dc-the-ai-tag-isnt-a-strategy Two days at AWS Summit in Washington, DC, big, well attended, informative, and underwhelming. In the rush to bolt an LLM onto everything, a lot of vendors forgot to do anything novel. Notes on what impressed, what didn't, and why it's still the data that decides the outcome. Fri, 03 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT Strategy https://concepttocloud.com/news/build-vs-hire-vs-consultancy-for-your-mvp https://concepttocloud.com/news/build-vs-hire-vs-consultancy-for-your-mvp Most founders agonise over which option is 'right' for their MVP. They're usually not the same option, the trade-offs are concrete, and the worst case is the hybrid that tries to be all three. Fri, 22 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT Strategy https://concepttocloud.com/news/cloud-stack-for-startups-what-actually-matters https://concepttocloud.com/news/cloud-stack-for-startups-what-actually-matters Most early-stage cloud stack debates are arguments about the wrong question. The tool doesn't matter nearly as much as the cost of switching, who fixes it at 3am, and whether your second engineer can read it. Fri, 22 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT Strategy https://concepttocloud.com/news/entity-resolution-in-postgres-trigrams-vs-embeddings https://concepttocloud.com/news/entity-resolution-in-postgres-trigrams-vs-embeddings Deduping messy real-world data, companies, addresses, people, looks like a solved problem until you do it. Here's an honest comparison of the three techniques that actually matter inside Postgres, when each one wins, and where each one quietly breaks. Fri, 22 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT Tips https://concepttocloud.com/news/most-platform-builds-fail-before-the-first-commit https://concepttocloud.com/news/most-platform-builds-fail-before-the-first-commit Platforms rarely flounder because the engineering was bad. They flounder because nobody agreed what was being built. Scope, requirements, and real customer collaboration decide the outcome long before code does. Fri, 22 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT Strategy https://concepttocloud.com/news/what-a-fractional-director-of-engineering-actually-does https://concepttocloud.com/news/what-a-fractional-director-of-engineering-actually-does Most people googling 'fractional Director of Engineering' aren't sure what they're hiring. Here's the honest read on the work, the cadence, and the four shapes of engagement, written by someone who's spent more than a decade doing it. Fri, 22 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT Strategy https://concepttocloud.com/news/what-actually-kills-cloud-migrations https://concepttocloud.com/news/what-actually-kills-cloud-migrations Most failed cloud migrations are blamed on the cloud bill, the vendor, or the consultancy. The real cause is almost always the same thing, and it's not technical. Fri, 22 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT Strategy https://concepttocloud.com/news/why-your-ai-project-is-actually-a-data-project https://concepttocloud.com/news/why-your-ai-project-is-actually-a-data-project Most AI projects fail in the data layer, not the model layer. The slide deck is about agents and RAG; the work that decides the outcome is unglamorous data engineering nobody scoped or staffed. Fri, 22 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT Strategy https://concepttocloud.com/news/apache-arrow-mondrian-segment-cache-and-adbc https://concepttocloud.com/news/apache-arrow-mondrian-segment-cache-and-adbc After replacing Mondrian's SQL emitter with Calcite, the next obvious target was the data path itself: an Apache Arrow segment cache and ADBC connections to replace JDBC. The first benchmarks said Arrow was 2.6x slower. They were wrong, but not for the reasons I expected. Here's the honest report on where columnar wins, where it ties, and where it actually loses. Mon, 18 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT Tips https://concepttocloud.com/news/rebuilding-saiku-with-ai-agents https://concepttocloud.com/news/rebuilding-saiku-with-ai-agents Years ago I walked away from Saiku, the commercial open source OLAP tool I'd built and run for the better part of a decade. This year, with a few weeks off and an agentic coding agent at my disposal, I rebuilt it, new UI, modernised dependencies, and a new SQL engine underneath. Here's what happened, and why I'm releasing it again. Thu, 14 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT Strategy https://concepttocloud.com/news/ai-wont-replace-engineers-but-it-will-replace-engineering-leaders https://concepttocloud.com/news/ai-wont-replace-engineers-but-it-will-replace-engineering-leaders Every week there's a new headline about AI replacing software engineers. The data tells a different story, and the real gap it's exposing isn't in code production, it's in engineering leadership. Wed, 15 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT Strategy https://concepttocloud.com/news/not-all-ai-created-equal https://concepttocloud.com/news/not-all-ai-created-equal Every product now has an 'AI' badge, but slapping a label on a fridge doesn't make it intelligent. Three critical questions separate leaders who understand AI from everyone else buying stickers. Mon, 16 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT Strategy https://concepttocloud.com/news/spacex-xai-merger-orbital-data-centers https://concepttocloud.com/news/spacex-xai-merger-orbital-data-centers Musk's $1.25 trillion merger isn't just corporate consolidation, it's a fundamental bet that terrestrial infrastructure can't scale to meet AI demand. For systems architects, the implications are significant. Tue, 03 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT Cloud Architecture https://concepttocloud.com/news/trio-model-fixing-business-it-dysfunction https://concepttocloud.com/news/trio-model-fixing-business-it-dysfunction When IT becomes a bottleneck and shadow solutions proliferate, structural reorganization won't fix misalignment. The Trio model offers a practical collaboration pattern for small teams navigating high-pressure environments. Sun, 14 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMT Strategy https://concepttocloud.com/news/anthropic-bun-acquisition-ai-runtime-strategy https://concepttocloud.com/news/anthropic-bun-acquisition-ai-runtime-strategy Anthropic's acquisition of Bun isn't just another dev tool purchase, it's a signal that AI companies are done relying on external infrastructure. When you own the model, the dev tools, and the runtime, you control the entire coding experience. Wed, 10 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMT Strategy https://concepttocloud.com/news/spacex-orbital-data-centers-starlink-v3 https://concepttocloud.com/news/spacex-orbital-data-centers-starlink-v3 SpaceX is turning Starlink V3 satellites into the backbone of orbital data centers, terabit-class capacity per satellite, an FCC filing for one million units, and a $1.25 trillion SpaceX-xAI merger funding the buildout. Fri, 07 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMT Cloud Infrastructure https://concepttocloud.com/news/essential-guide-cloud-migration https://concepttocloud.com/news/essential-guide-cloud-migration A comprehensive cloud migration roadmap for 2025, covering foundational assessment through legacy system decommissioning, migration strategies, planning, execution, and long-term success factors. Tue, 14 Jan 2025 00:00:00 GMT Strategy https://concepttocloud.com/news/from-quantum-to-ai-future-of-cloud-computing https://concepttocloud.com/news/from-quantum-to-ai-future-of-cloud-computing Explore transformative trends reshaping cloud computing, from serverless evolution and AI integration to quantum computing and generative AI. Tue, 14 Jan 2025 00:00:00 GMT Research https://concepttocloud.com/news/quest-for-new-banking-security https://concepttocloud.com/news/quest-for-new-banking-security Concept to Cloud partnered with Consilient to engineer a secure cross-bank fraud detection system using federated learning, overcoming strict banking security requirements and data inconsistencies. Wed, 27 Nov 2024 00:00:00 GMT Information https://concepttocloud.com/news/beyond-chatgpt-documentation-developer-success https://concepttocloud.com/news/beyond-chatgpt-documentation-developer-success Despite the rise of AI assistants like ChatGPT, well-crafted technical documentation remains essential for developer success. Compare AWS and Azure documentation approaches. Fri, 25 Oct 2024 00:00:00 GMT Strategy https://concepttocloud.com/news/ultimate-guide-cloud-based-research https://concepttocloud.com/news/ultimate-guide-cloud-based-research Explore how cloud computing transforms collaborative research by enabling seamless data sharing and real-time teamwork across distributed global teams. Mon, 14 Oct 2024 00:00:00 GMT Research https://concepttocloud.com/news/cloud-first-concepts https://concepttocloud.com/news/cloud-first-concepts Explore cloud-first architectural principles for startups and small teams. Learn why building applications with cloud-native services reduces operational overhead and total cost of ownership. Mon, 12 Aug 2024 00:00:00 GMT Tips https://concepttocloud.com/news/how-long-does-it-take https://concepttocloud.com/news/how-long-does-it-take Explore the complexities of determining project timelines, specifically examining deployment and prototype development phases in cloud environments. Wed, 07 Aug 2024 00:00:00 GMT Tips https://concepttocloud.com/news/should-i-be-using-kubernetes https://concepttocloud.com/news/should-i-be-using-kubernetes Examine whether Kubernetes is the right choice for your infrastructure needs. Learn when Kubernetes excels and when simpler alternatives like Docker Compose, AWS ECS, or Google Cloud Run make more sense. Wed, 07 Aug 2024 00:00:00 GMT Tips https://concepttocloud.com/news/taking-concept-and-running-with-it https://concepttocloud.com/news/taking-concept-and-running-with-it Explore the process of transforming business ideas into deployable prototypes and MVPs. Learn the critical questions founders and project managers should ask when bringing concepts to market. Wed, 07 Aug 2024 00:00:00 GMT Tips