Backbone Engineering

For 25 years we've shifted engineering work left: CI, CD, DevOps, DevSecOps and now AI. But we've never stopped rebuilding the same operational foundations. The next shift isn't left. It's down.

AWS Transform's new landing zone agent and Superwerker both stand up governed multi-account AWS environments - but they're built for different moments in a company's cloud journey. A read-from-the-docs take, plus why Backbone still points greenfield teams at Superwerker.

CloudFormation graph tools faithfully document infrastructure, not architecture. A hybrid Cursor + Kiro workflow analysed a real CDK repository, extracted architectural intent and generated the first AWS diagram I'd actually publish.

Intermittent Amazon Managed Prometheus remote-write failures looked like encoding or signing bugs. The real signal was CloudWatch DiscardedSamples - and the fix was embarrassingly familiar if you've operated Prometheus at scale.

Every software company starts with one product. Given enough time, almost every successful team ends up building a second one they never planned for.

Production readiness isn't about whether a system runs. It's about how it behaves under failure, change, and scale - and most teams discover the gap too late.

Most early-stage teams think they're building one product. They're actually building two - and the second one quietly consumes man-years of engineering time.