“We just built an MCP server so our AI agents can query the production database directly.”
Read EssayCarlos Mora
Principal Platform Architect & AI Systems Engineer
If production reliability or compliance depends on human vigilance, the architecture has already failed. With 25+ years designing enterprise infrastructure across on-premise, AWS, and GCP, I build platforms with deterministic guardrails—removing traps from the floor so engineering teams can scale data platforms and AI workloads safely by default.
Featured Architectural Essay
Recent Writing
MCP Without Zero Trust Is a Security Incident Waiting to Happen
“We just built an MCP server so our AI agents can query the production database directly.”
A Slack Message Is Not a Release Control
There is a moment in post-incident meetings that plays out across tech organizations with painful predictability.
Automating with AI is not adopting AI
There is a pattern that repeats itself every time a team seriously starts working with AI tools.
Your AI workload is not your infrastructure's problem. Until it is.
There’s a conversation happening in the software architecture community about how bad code design inflates LLM token consumption. It’s a valid point. But it misses an entire layer of the...
AWS Cost Explorer Just Got Conversational — And That Changes the Workflow
AWS just closed the last friction gap in cost analysis.
Architectural Case Studies
Platform governance framework for multi-account Snowflake environments across AWS and GCP, featuring automated RBAC, preview-by-default guardrails, and multi-layer cost controls.
Read RetrospectiveArchitectural Convictions
Deterministic Guardrails over Human Vigilance
A Slack message, a post-deploy checklist, or a "be careful" warning is an architectural antipattern. If an engineer can trigger an outage by missing a notification on a Friday afternoon, the failure belongs to the platform design. Structural IAM constraints and automated pre-flight gates prevent errors before execution.
Zero Trust for Autonomous & Agentic Workloads
Exposing APIs to LLMs without ephemeral credentials, identity federation, and execution gateways turns agentic tooling into arbitrary remote code execution. AI agents must operate under the same least-privilege boundaries and audit trails as human operators.
Multi-Layer Cost Circuit Breakers
Cost control in distributed data platforms cannot rely on end-of-month invoice reconciliations. FinOps discipline requires proactive architectural circuit breakers: strict warehouse auto-suspend policies, statement timeouts, resource monitors, and query connection reuse embedded into IaC.
Compliance by Construction
In regulated enterprise environments (HIPAA, SOC 2, HITRUST), compliance cannot be a panicked quarterly audit scramble. It must be an immutable, continuously generated byproduct of platform automation, OIDC federation, and immutable change logs.