Category Uncategorized

FinOps Maturity Curve for Data

Data costs are where cloud costs were a decade ago. The maturity curve from ignorance to continuous optimisation, and where most data teams actually sit on it.

Server rack with active GPU cluster full load and server rack with idle GPU cluster load side by side

GPU Economics for Data Teams

Data teams have decades of intuition about CPU compute. GPU economics break most of it. The utilisation problem, the build/rent question, and what actually pays back.

Cloud network with streams of digital data flowing upward over city buildings at night

Egress – The Tax You Forgot About

Cloud egress is the slow tax. It doesn’t show up in the architecture diagram. It doesn’t show up in the storage bill. It shows up as a line item once a month that everyone keeps meaning to look at, until…

Query Cost Is a Product Decision

In most orgs, query cost is not something we bake into the design phase (mainly because we don’t know…duh). But it’s then subsequently forgotten all the way through the production and the first exciting invoice. Then people complain internally. Maybe…

The Real Cost of a Petabyte

“A petabyte costs about $23 a month in S3.” You may hear this (you may not if you have a social life). It’s not really true, in the sense that nobody actually pays $23 a month for a petabyte and…

Hallucinations on Structured Data

LLM hallucinations on unstructured data have been known for the last few years. The chatbot makes up a citation and the summariser invents a quote. The RAG system produces a confident answer not in the source. This is a known…

Evaluating an Analytics Agent

Evaluating an analytics agent (or team of agents) is WAY harder than evaluating a chatbot, harder than evaluating a search system, and considerably harder than evaluating a regular ETL pipeline. The reason: the right answer isn’t just a string or…

Tool Use Is the New ETL

ETL has been the same conceptual thing for 50 years. Tool use is what it becomes when the orchestrator is an LLM. What changes, what survives, and why MCP matters.

The Semantic Layer Renaissance

Embarrassing legacy BI vocabulary five years ago, back at the centre of the data stack today. The dbt / warehouse / OSI convergence.

Agents Need Schemas, Not Just Docs

Pointing your agent at the Confluence docs isn't enough. What 'agent-ready metadata' actually means, and why most enterprises fail the metadata-only test.