Schematical

2025 flew by! Crazy to think about all that happened.



In January I started Cloud War Games.



In February Lerato joined my team as my Executive Assistant and now I can not believe I was ever able to do business without her.



In March I did a “Nuclear” hands-on project where I designed and built an extremely scalable cost effective free text search engine for one of my big clients.



In April we launched my O’Reilly’s On Demand Course Zero to Hero on AWS Security: An Animated Guide to Security in the Cloud - www.oreilly.com/videos/zero-to-hero/0642572107789/




In June I got bicep repair surgery and I am happy to say I am back to 100% as of now.

In July Dominic and Kelly joined the team. Unfortunately Kelly’s other responsibilities have since drawn her away but Dominic is still helping me keep the wheels on the bus.



In August I did a live presentation for the Badger Startup Summit and hosted the first Cloud War Games live event.



September and October I was a guest on a handful of great podcasts - schematical.com/press.



Sadly in November a close family member passed away but thanks to my amazing team we were able to keep the plates spinning at Schematical while I helped my family out.



In December I had some really interesting projects pop up on my radar for 2026 right before I managed to take my first vacation in a long, long time. I do take time off, but since I got dogs and a house I rarely travel. My house is typically the vacation destination.



I am sure I missed a few things there but that is the gist of it.



As for what we at Schematical have planned for 2026 you will have to wait and see.


I hope you had a great 2025 and hopefully 2026 will be another great year!

10 hours ago | [YT] | 0

Schematical

Check out Matt's latest podcast interview on the The Virtual CISO Podcast:

podcasts.apple.com/am/podcast/episode-155-incident…





Enjoy!



~The Schematical Team

1 day ago | [YT] | 0

Schematical

Database Savings Plans

During AWS Reinvent this year, I was on a call with one of my larger customers’ AWS reps when they informed us that AWS had just dropped new Database Savings Plans that allowed up to a 35% discount.



It was so new that the AWS reps didn’t have any details they could share yet.



With that said, over the next few months, I will likely start cycling my clients into these plans using the same guidelines I have been writing about.



Something interesting I observed about DB savings plans in general is that you never get near the savings rate that you get for compute spend.



I figured that, as opposed to just raw compute resources, DB has the additional cost of long-term storage.



So even if you turned off the DB completely and it wasn’t servicing queries, it has the cost of storage of the entire dataset that is stored on the DB. Given that cost is a constant (if the data were flat), they can’t discount it as deeply.



Just an observation. Let me know if you have another theory.



Either way, I just wanted to make sure these new savings plans are on your radar.

If you need help figuring out a good repeatable strategy for long-term savings, please feel free to reach out to me.

2 days ago | [YT] | 1

Schematical

Hiring Devs In 2026 - Part 3

GitHub used to be my go-to. Most of my top hires have 100 or so repos. Now, just creating a repo isn’t enough; it is what is in the repos that tells you a lot about the candidate.



In the modern era of “AI”, a substitute for GitHub might be contributions made to HuggingFace or a similar website, which comes with nuances, but a lot of this translates.



Are their recent repos just forks of Hello World tutorials? If so, then you can bet they are pretty entry-level in those technologies.



Have they forked a prominent framework, then pull-requested fixes back into the main repo? If so, they are likely proficient with that tech.



Do they have a lot of random passion projects? Great, the more passionate the better. Look deeper.



Do they have good commit messages and a well-written README file? If so, they are likely a good communicator.



What do they tend to focus on for these projects? Over-engineering every detail, or are they 100% cowboying up spaghetti code to ship features?



I am not saying either is better, but it's best to know before you hire them.



Do they tend to use existing tools and frameworks, or do they like to keep it close to the metal, writing their own proprietary tools whenever possible?



Lastly and possibly most importantly, do they collaborate with others? Do they teach or are they happy to create knowledge silos that give them Job Security but end up costing your team a lot of time and money?


Basically, even an intern-level candidate should have some type of portfolio. A senior-level candidate should have an extensive portfolio that you can look at and learn a lot about them.



If they don't, that is a red flag in my opinion.

3 days ago | [YT] | 0

Schematical

Leveraging tech debt for massive profit

Some people think all debt is bad debt.



I can respect that in some ways, but I have watched firsthand as technical entrepreneurs have leveraged a significant amount of tech debt into 9-figure businesses.


It’s quite similar to taking on a debt to buy rental properties. As long as the property isn’t a money pit and there is a sea of renters and you didn’t get screwed on the rate/terms of the loan, it's a pretty sound investment.



The key to this is knowing what tech debt has a high interest rate and what tech debt has a low interest rate.



Let’s say you have a problem that needs to be fixed, but instead of fixing it, you just throw money at bigger servers and kick solving that problem down the road for a bit.

Is that a problem?



For example, let's say we have a problem (AKA tech debt) that is costing you $1,000 extra in server costs per month, but it would take $10,000 in engineering hours to fix.

You might be tempted to throw the engineering hours at it. In 12 months, you will have a $2,000 positive ROI.



But let's say that $10,000 in engineering hours could be spent on features that would give you a gain of $100,000 over the next year. Is paying down that $12,000 (12x$1000/mo) worth more to you than that $100,000 of value over the next year?



The problem is it’s not as obvious as taking out a loan from a bank or buying T Bills. Spending extra on computers, though common, is on the simpler side of the spectrum when trying to quantify tech debt.



The bottom line is, if you can figure out how to leverage tech debt without being overwhelmed by it, then you can use that to build some amazing businesses. But just like financial debt, be careful, it can compound quickly.



Need help figuring out how to tell what the interest rates on your tech debt are or how to leverage it better? That’s part of what I do, so feel free to reach out for one-on-one consulting or join my group coaching community.

6 days ago | [YT] | 2

Schematical

Here is Matt's latest podcast interview and article on To The Point - Cybersecurity:


www.forcepoint.com/resources/podcast/cloud-war-gam…



Enjoy!



~The Schematical Team

1 week ago | [YT] | 1

Schematical

Tool calls with AWS Bedrock are easier than you think

I had a use case come up recently where we wanted to keep all the data on AWS inside the AWS account for the project.



Lots of people have a fairly rational fear that they don’t want to give their data over to big tech like ChatGPT. Despite ChatGPT claiming they do NOT train on data, a requirement was made to keep it in AWS since AWS has all of our data anyway. I am not a lawyer, and I don’t play one on the internet, so double-check your terms and services.



I chose to give AWS Bedrock a spin, specifically their Converse API.



I was surprised to see there wasn’t anything that needed to be provisioned.

Converse’s serverless inference implementation just worked out of the box. That blew my mind a bit, but I suppose why would you?



Just charge per invocation, it’s not like it has persistent data or stores code like a lambda.



Setup:



It's super simple, it just uses the AWS SDK v3, and you send it Converse Commands. Include the tool call definition, and it will respond just like you would expect.

How did it perform?




I was able to get Amazon’s Nova Lite to do simple tool calls, no problem. I decided to try my luck with Nova micro to see how that ran, and it correctly made the same tool call with the exact right parameters.



What did it cost?



I can’t go into too much detail on what I was using it for right now, but I was able to get it to run each inference for about $0.00002. If this were running on a website with 100,000 executions a day, we are talking about $2 per day.



Now that is without any caching or high-performance tuning. Add that in, and we could cut that down a bit more.



My plan is to dig into this a bit deeper in future posts.



If you want to get access to hands-on workshops about how to do serverless inference at scale on AWS, check out the Schematical Group Coaching Community.

1 week ago | [YT] | 2

Schematical

AWS Lambda Managed Instances

Allow me to introduce AWS Lambda Managed Instances. You can now choose what underlying hardware your Lambda functions run on for better performance and cost optimization.



Unfortunately, I haven’t found anything about running them on GPU instances yet, so that might not be available quite yet.



Interestingly enough, you get charged for 3 things: $0.20 per 1M invocations, the EC2 instance’s normal compute hour costs, and an additional 15% of the EC2 instance cost as a “Compute Management" fee.



I’m curious how this weighs out over just using Lambda. I suppose if you had a fairly constant and predictable amount of invocations, it could weigh out in the end.



Question for you:
Do you have a use case for AWS Lambda Managed Instances?

1 week ago | [YT] | 2

Schematical

Looking for a fun way to learn the fundamentals of network load balancing?



Then you should check out Server Survival (pshenok.github.io/server-survival/) by Kostyantyn Pshenychnyy.



It's an opensource game in the tower defense genre. Your job is to build a scalable network using ALBs, EC2 instances, WAF, RDS, and S3.



I saw commits as recently as 18 hours ago, so it looks like he is still adding to it.

I can see a lot of potential with this game. It's super basic right now, but if the developer even starts adding things as simple as CloudFront or Route53 load balancing, we could see some really fun play styles.



Adding another layer, like security groups or VPCs and subnets, could be really fun as well.



I suppose this is obvious considering my own work with isometric diagrams, but I love this diagram style.



I would like to thank Jonathan Limbird for putting this fun project on my radar.

1 week ago | [YT] | 0

Schematical

Hiring Devs In 2026 - Part 2

What to look for in a potential technical candidate:



At the rate at which things are changing, if a candidate is not spending a good amount of time sharpening their skills and keeping up with all the new tech that is out there, then they probably shouldn’t be considered for a position as someone leading the charge for your technical infrastructure.



This is especially true if they are job hunting.



If they are just a “hands-on” person whose sole purpose is to sling code, only doing what they are told, perhaps this isn’t as true, but I would advise you to hire as few of these people as possible on your core team.



How do you vet this?


If they are creating content around a topic, that is a solid indicator that they are sharpening their skills, but few do this. Likely a fear of embarrassing themselves. If you are on the job-hunting side of things, I strongly suggest you document your professional development process.



You want to stand out as much as possible in a stack of resumes, and one of the best ways of doing that is to give the hiring party a large digital backlog of content they can binge that clearly communicates your capabilities to them.



Conversely, if you are a hiring party, you want a candidate who puts in the extra effort, not just to build the code but to clearly communicate what they did and why.



First off, this demonstrates that they can communicate, so a year or two from now, when people are asking “Why did we write this code?” you have an audit trail to your thought process.



Secondly, these types of people tend to be teachers, not just leveling up their own skills, but creating a clear path for other team members to follow and level up their skills.



If a candidate is creating content about their journey to level up their skills, I would move those to the top of my list of people to talk to.



There are still a lot of other factors to consider, but their content will help you learn a lot about how the candidate will fit into your team.

2 weeks ago | [YT] | 0