Hi, I'm Rostyslav
RSS FeedI'm a cloud solutions architect and engineering lead with 15+ years across DevOps, cloud architecture, and networking. These days I spend most of my time on AWS, Kubernetes, and GenAI systems, and I lead teams that build them.
This is where I write about the things I'm working on and learning: cloud architecture, infrastructure as code, CI/CD, and the occasional deep dive into whatever's caught my attention. You can also read more about my work .
Featured
The private cloud we built before it was cool
From 2016 to 2019 I helped build a private cloud on top of very early Kubernetes, with a drag-and-drop canvas, VMs running inside pods before Kata existed, and an enterprise-grade network layer I led, from GCP-style flat overlays to a 12-to-60 Gbps DPDK data path. The company is gone. The story shouldn't be.
Designing agentic AI on Bedrock, a real-world journey
A support-ticket classifier that started as one enormous prompt costing $145k a year, went through a pile of overbuilt architectures, and ended as a deterministic pipeline with no agent in it at all, costing $744. Here's every wrong turn and what actually broke.
Making sense of my own DNA with OSGenome
How an underwhelming Ancestry test sent me down a rabbit hole of raw DNA files, SNPedia, and an open-source project I ended up rebuilding to work with my own data.
Recent Posts
The four weeks I spent not doing my job
Another semi-management story. On an AWS ProServe engagement, a big four partner had already owned the project for six months, and they wanted us nowhere near the real work. My first instinct was to push for a seat at the decision-making table, and that instinct was the problem. Here is what four weeks of deliberately not doing my job cost, the technical debt I watched pile up, and why the trust-building turned out to be the work itself.
The engineer I kept promoting anyway
A management story instead of an architecture one. I found Andrew in our company's training lab and over four years promoted him from student to architect. He was reliable, independent, technically excellent, and great with peers and customers. He was also, to exactly one person, a persistent pain: me. The Friday-evening complaint calls, the mailing list he quietly unsubscribed from to needle me, the HR conversation that backfired, and the promotion committee that needed an architect I happened to be. How I learned to manage for the team's output and not for my own comfort.
The Kubernetes cluster that had to survive the open ocean
A pre-sale asked for Kubernetes in the server room of a cruise ship. The ship is a distraction. The real constraint is that the network becomes a scheduled resource, present in port and gone at sea, and that splits the system into a runtime that has to survive for days with no link home and a lifecycle of updates and image pulls that can only happen while the ship is connected. EKS Anywhere runs the whole cluster on the boat, which is why it fit and why keeping the control plane onshore would not have.
The private cloud with no requirements
A government customer in the Gulf asked for a private cloud with Kubernetes and handed over no requirements. The design work turned out to be inventing the requirements: imagining the tenants who would show up and what they would ask for, then choosing technology against the two questions that stand in for the word best when there is no spec, whether it locks you in and whether it is already paid for.