<![CDATA[The Cloud Dive]]>https://theclouddive.comhttps://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Qd10!,w_256,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F7be82cb5-9eb0-4b86-96e8-07063afdc715_800x800.pngThe Cloud Divehttps://theclouddive.comSubstackSat, 16 May 2026 03:44:05 GMT<![CDATA[A Dev Kafka Broker for the Price of a Bad Coffee]]>https://theclouddive.com/p/a-dev-kafka-broker-for-the-pricehttps://theclouddive.com/p/a-dev-kafka-broker-for-the-priceMon, 09 Mar 2026 13:45:47 GMT
An AI generated diagram of this deployment — laptop → fly proxy → Kafka broker on Fly.io.

Deploying Kafka on Fly.io

Before I could wire Kafka into Sentinel’s ingestion layer, I needed a Kafka broker that wasn’t going to cost me $50/month to leave running while I figured things out.

AWS MSK? Overkill for dev work. I need something in the middle — a real bro…

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]]><![CDATA[Sentinel: Scoping the Ingestion Layer Architecture]]>https://theclouddive.com/p/sentinel-scoping-the-ingestion-layerhttps://theclouddive.com/p/sentinel-scoping-the-ingestion-layerMon, 02 Mar 2026 17:31:12 GMTDesigning the Architecture: What We’re Building and Why

Last episode we talked about the gap — the difference between a portfolio that shows you can deploy and one that shows you can design.

Now we close the gap.

This is where Sentinel stops being an idea and starts being a system. But before we get into what we built, we need to start with something most …

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]]><![CDATA[Sentinel: Why Most Cloud Portfolios Don’t Get You Hired]]>https://theclouddive.com/p/sentinel-why-most-cloud-portfolioshttps://theclouddive.com/p/sentinel-why-most-cloud-portfoliosTue, 24 Feb 2026 17:43:19 GMT

This is Episode 0 of Sentinel, a public build documenting production-level cloud thinking.

You did the tutorials. You deployed the thing. Maybe you have the certifications.

And nobody cares.

That’s not bitterness. That’s the market telling you something. Most cloud portfolios look the same to the person reading them — and that person has seen forty of them…

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]]><![CDATA[The Only 4 Terraform Commands You Need to Start]]>https://theclouddive.com/p/the-only-4-terraform-commands-youhttps://theclouddive.com/p/the-only-4-terraform-commands-youWed, 18 Feb 2026 22:59:02 GMTTerraform is the quickest way to start managing infrastructure at scale. Period.

You need to spin up 3 VMs, 3 AWS App Runner services, and an ECS cluster then you need to keep track of ECR repos, security groups, databases, networking, etc. Manually? That gets messy fast.

Terraform keeps track of all of it through state. It keeps a record of every resourc…

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]]><![CDATA[Deploying Keycloak on Fly.io from 0 to 1]]>https://theclouddive.com/p/deploying-keycloak-on-flyio-fromhttps://theclouddive.com/p/deploying-keycloak-on-flyio-fromSun, 15 Feb 2026 22:33:53 GMTThis is part one on a three part series on fly.io and keycloak. I am running a keycloak server on a DO droplet and exploring moving it to fly to cut costs. Is this FinOps you say?

In this first part I am showing how to deploy the fly app so that we can start exploring performance and costs in the next two articles of the series. So let’s get started.

The …

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