Explained: AWS ENIs (Elastic Network Interfaces)

Your production database server starts throwing errors at 2 a.m. The on-call engineer spins up a replacement instance, and now the scramble begins: update the DNS record, wait for the TTL to expire, reconfigure the firewall rules that were pinned to the old private IP, and hope every downstream service notices the change. Twenty minutes of downtime, most of it spent chasing a network identity that was welded to a machine that no longer exists. Th… Read More

In Focus: The Lean AI Firm

Information in this post reflects publicly available sources as of June 22, 2026. A code editor called Cursor reportedly crossed two billion dollars in annual recurring revenue this year. The team behind it is somewhere around fifty people. That works out to roughly forty million dollars of revenue for every person on the payroll, a figure that simply did not exist in software before the last couple of years. Cursor is not a fluke. Midjourney is r… Read More

Architecture: Snowflake

A data engineer kicks off a heavy quarterly report at 9 a.m. It scans two years of order history and takes four minutes to run. At the same moment, three hundred analysts open their morning dashboards, a nightly load job is still flushing yesterday's events into the warehouse, and a data scientist is training a churn model against the same tables. On a traditional warehouse, all of these workloads fight over the same fixed pool of CPU and di… Read More

In Focus: Microsoft's Majorana 2

Information in this post reflects publicly available sources as of June 16, 2026. On June 2, at the close of its Build 2026 conference, Microsoft held up a small gold-and-blue chip and made a claim that would be hard to overstate. Its quantum bits, the company said, had become 1,000 times more reliable than the previous generation. One Microsoft technical fellow put it plainly from the stage: "We're 1,000 times better." The room und… Read More

Architecture: Amazon Aurora

You have a production MySQL database on RDS. It works fine at low traffic. Then your load doubles, and you start running into the ceiling: replication lag, failover times measured in minutes, and the uncomfortable knowledge that your data lives on a single EBS volume. You can throw more compute at it, but the storage layer stays the same. The database is the bottleneck, and there is no obvious way out short of a full re-architecture. Amazon Auror… Read More