I'm a Principal Cloud Architect with thirty-plus years of senior practice across the technology waves that have actually shaped enterprise computing — Internet, identity federation, security, Industrial Control Systems, NERC CIP, cloud, and now AI. Most of what I write here is shaped by that arc.
This site is where I think out loud. The professional sections — Cloud, AI, GridTech, ICS Security — are the domains I work in or pay close attention to. The personal sections — Drones, 3D Printing — are where I tinker. They share more engineering DNA than the categorization suggests.
The Research Curation Daemon is a podcast I built and operate as a fully autonomous personal AI pipeline: it scouts, synthesizes, and produces weekly briefings across AI, Cloud, GridTech, and Security. It's also a worked example of what I think enterprise AI practice should look like — agentic, telemetry-first, with a single explicit human-judgment gate.
Most posts here are AI-assisted, in the sense that nearly all writing is now. They are not AI slop. If you find one that reads like slop, that's a defect and I want to know about it — reach me through Contact.
Notes from a Principal Cloud Architect — cloud, AI, grid technology, ICS security, plus drones and 3D printing. Home of the Research Curation Daemon podcast.
The vocabulary of "multi-X" gets thrown around loosely in cloud architecture conversations, and four different things end up conflated into one. Multi-AZ, multi-account, multi-region, multi-cloud — they sound related but they aren't really. They have different costs, different benefits, and different prerequisites. They deserve to be evaluated separately.
Multi-AZ: the resilience pattern you mostly get for free It's worth naming what the cloud gives you almost by default — and what corporate on-prem data centers historically didn't. A modern cloud region is a cluster of independent availability zones, typically three or more, each its own physical data center with its own power, network, and cooling. The major managed services — databases, load balancers, queues, object stores, even Kubernetes control planes — are designed to run across AZs. Active-active-active across three AZs is the cloud-native default, not an architectural achievement.
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The vocabulary of "multi-X" gets thrown around loosely in cloud architecture conversations, and four different things end up conflated into one. Multi-AZ, multi-account, multi-region, multi-cloud — they sound related but they aren't really. They have different costs, different benefits, and different prerequisites. They deserve to be evaluated separately.
Multi-AZ: the resilience pattern you mostly get for free Before getting to anything else, it's worth naming what the cloud gives you almost by default — and what corporate on-prem data centers historically didn't. A modern cloud region is a cluster of independent availability zones, typically three or more, each its own physical data center with its own power, network, and cooling. The major managed services — databases, load balancers, queues, object stores, even Kubernetes control planes — are designed to run across AZs. Active-active-active across three AZs is the cloud-native default, not an architectural achievement.
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Most of my recent print queue has been Tesla accessories. There's a particular satisfaction in printing parts you'll then use every day — the design gets evaluated by daily wear, road heat, sun exposure, and an honest read on whether it was worth the spool. Tighter feedback loop than most hobby printing.
A few of the recent prints, all in ASA:
Adapter locking rings. A small ring that secures your charging adapter to the J-1772 cable such that it can't be disconnected while you're inside the store. The first time you print one and use it, you wonder how the adapters ever shipped without integrated locks. Tiny part, real-world utility, and an obvious example of the community closing a gap a vendor left open.
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Five months after the manual-to-MCP pivot, I noticed the MCP server was doing two different jobs. One was a tool surface for an agent — the task for which I'd designed and built the MCP server. The other was the hosting environment for the daemon itself: long-running, stateful, with a job queue and a state machine that wanted to live longer than any single Claude Desktop session.
For most of those five months, the two jobs sharing one process was fine. Then it wasn't.
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"The personal daemon was a semi-autonomous piece of software that lived in your system and acted as your agent, going out into the Cloud to do things for you." — Neal Stephenson, Fall, or Dodge in Hell
I have been quietly drowning in feeds for years. Not in a productive way — in the "I have 47 tabs open and three of them are arXiv" way. AI research, cloud infrastructure, smart-grid news. Each domain moves fast enough on its own; together they generate more credible signal than any one human can absorb.
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