Aws

Self-hosting LLM …

Why we self-hosted in the first place

At Colombia’s first fully digital bank, the pressure to use LLMs showed up the same way it did everywhere else. Everyone wanted summarization, log triage, and natural-language querying over operational data. The catch was that our data (transaction …

A zero-downtime AWS→GCP …

Why we migrated at all

I spent the second half of 2025 on contract with a US retail and delivery startup, moving their entire production stack from AWS to Google Cloud. That was roughly 25 services on a Python and Go codebase. The trigger wasn’t a technical purity argument. It came down to …

Running a digital bank at …

Why five nines, and what it actually cost us to promise it

For a little over five years I was the DevOps and Infrastructure Lead for Colombia’s first fully digital bank, built on AWS. Signing up to a 99.999% availability SLO sounds like a slide-deck number until you do the arithmetic. It …