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Notes from the field.

Practical notes on cloud delivery, migrations, and managed services across NZISM, CIS, NIST and other frameworks, written by the people who deliver the work.

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Idle Doesn't Mean Free.

A field guide to pricing AI workloads on AWS: token math, vector database OCUs, multiplied environments, observability, and data transfer.

FinOps · 15 Sep 2026 · 6 min read

Idle Doesn't Mean Free: A Field Guide to Pricing AI Workloads on AWS

Most AI cost estimates stop at the token rate. Here's where the rest of the bill actually comes from: vector database OCUs that charge whether you query them or not, environments that multiply fixed costs, observability, and data transfer through VPCs and Transit Gateway.

More from CloudPro
AI Engineering · 2 Aug 2026 · 6 min read

AWS for AI Workloads: A Strategic Playbook for Security, Cost, and Scale

AI workloads don't behave like traditional applications. Here's a practical playbook for architects and leaders building on AWS, from Well-Architected AI lenses to Bedrock Guardrails to where AI budgets actually go off the rails.

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