Notes from production

Blog

Practical articles on AWS Bedrock cost optimization, knowledge graphs, AI infrastructure, and cloud architecture — from the ThinkXL team.

Cheaper Alternatives to AWS in 2026: What Each One Cuts

There is no single cheapest alternative to AWS, because AWS bills are not shaped the same way. A bill dominated by EC2 has a different answer from one dominated by egress, RDS or GPU-hours. And severa

Hetzner vs AWS: The Real Cost Difference in 2026

For a standing 8-vCPU, 16 GB server, AWS charges about $212 per month on demand and Hetzner charges €20.99, or roughly $25. That is a factor of nine, and it is not a rounding error. The gap is also no

Leaving AWS for Hetzner: What You Have to Rebuild

Moving from AWS to Hetzner keeps compute, block storage, private networking, load balancers, DNS and object storage, and replaces the managed database, the managed Kubernetes control plane, IAM, Cloud

Bedrock Agents vs AgentCore: What to Use Now

Updated 2 September 2026: Amazon Bedrock Agents Classic moved to maintenance mode in June 2026. This post has been rewritten around the options that are actually available now. **Amazon Bedrock Age

What Is Amazon Bedrock AgentCore? (And When to Use It)

Amazon Bedrock AgentCore is a managed platform for deploying and operating AI agents you've already built — in any framework, with any model — without managing the runtime, memory, identity, or observ

Model Evals: How to Know If You Can Use a Cheaper Model

An eval, in the AI FinOps context, is a structured comparison: run a representative sample of real production inputs through your current model and a cheaper candidate, score both against a defined qu