For most of my career, I’ve been that guy — the “bad guy” who keeps telling uncomfortable truths to C-level managers and enterprise architects who’d rather hear “everything’s fine.”
I warned about single-region dependencies, blind faith in hyperscalers, and the danger of outsourcing your core competence to “the cloud.”
For years, I was dismissed as pessimistic — or worse, old-school.
Back in 1999, I built a nationwide email infrastructure on Delphi 5, that ran entirely on Windows NT x386 machines — cheap, off-the-shelf hardware — balanced purely in software, capable of handling 4,000 concurrent connections across redundant active/passive pairs.
No Kubernetes. No elastic autoscaling. No “cloud regions.”
Just real engineering.
Understanding how systems breathe under load. How memory, network I/O, and threads interact at the metal level.
That system ran faster and more reliably than many of today’s “modern” architectures built on cloud-native buzzwords.
Fast forward 25+ years, and here we are — outages, performance collapses, and AI workloads melting entire regions.
Governments and defense agencies finally moving to the cloud… right as the cloud era starts to show its cracks.
I’ve been called back — again and again — by the same enterprises that once ignored those warnings.
Senior architects, with 15–20 years in the same place, reaching out in panic because the systems they trusted are failing in ways they don’t understand.
And every time I hear it, it still stings:
how we built layers of abstraction so thick that nobody knows where the real bottleneck lives anymore.
I’m not bitter — just tired of being proven right the hard way.
Resilience isn’t something you buy from AWS or Azure.
It’s something you design — from first principles, with an honest understanding of failure.
If you’ve ever been labeled “the crazy one” for insisting on sound architecture, for questioning the hype, for designing with independence in mind — don’t stop.
Because when the lights flicker, when the cloud stumbles, when the load balancer fails —
they’ll remember who warned them.
Truth and uptime always win.
