Lukman Balunywa — field notes on cloud architecture, distributed systems, and AI infrastructure
New here? These four cover the ground I keep returning to in architecture reviews.
Disaggregating Postgres is not just an internals change. It rewrites how you think about failover, latency, and cost.
PostgreSQL has earned its place because it is boring in the best way. It is reliable, familiar, extensible, and battle-tested. For most workloads, the traditional PostgreSQL architecture works extremely well.
But at cloud scale, the same design starts to show pressure.
Read more →· 7 min
Migration, modernization, and AI all converge on the same database. That is what makes PostgreSQL the play.
The cloud database conversation keeps moving. One year it is NoSQL. Another year it is serverless. Then it is lakehouse. Then vector databases. Then AI-native databases.
But underneath most serious applications, the same truth keeps showing up: PostgreSQL is still one of the biggest cloud opportunities in front of us.
Read more →· 7 min
You cannot cache your way out of a chatty data layer. The shape of your queries decides the shape of your product.
Latency is easy to dismiss until customers feel it.
A page takes too long to load. A checkout flow stalls. A support agent waits on a search result. A transaction hangs for just long enough to make the user click again. An internal app feels "slow," but nobody can explain exactly where the time is going.
Read more →· 8 min
The interesting engineering in agent systems is not the prompt. It is the boundary between the model and your data plane.
A lot of what we call "AI agents" today are still workflows with better language.
They can summarize. They can classify. They can route. They can generate text. They can call a tool. They can chain a few steps together and make the experience feel more intelligent.
Read more →· 6 min
After dozens of reviews, the questions cluster into a much smaller set than you would expect.
Architecture reviews are never really about the diagram.
The diagram matters. The services matter. The network paths matter. The data flow matters. The security boundaries matter.
Read more →· 7 min