Bloggy Notes

Two kinds of writing, one landing page: the long pieces and the short ones. Blog first, notes after -- kept as separate sections, not merged into one list.

BlogInvisible Wires: Agentic Cloud

Notes from a home lab on agentic operations, hybrid multicloud, and the wires nobody sees. By Alex Alvord and Waku.

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October 4, 2026Resilience is now a regulated number: what DORA, the PRA and US third-party guidance mean for hybrid multicloudThree regulators on two continents now ask financial institutions the same question: show us you can lose a provider and keep serving customers. DORA, the PRA's impact tolerances and the US interagency third-party guidance turn resilience from a slide into a number you have to test and defend. Here is what the three have in common, what it does to cloud architecture, and the three questions I would put to any CIO before the next exam.By Alex Alvord
September 18, 2026Agentic Cloud: An IntroductionA Pacific Northwest native, twenty-five years of wires, and why the nights now go to harnesses and agents across AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud.By Alex Alvord
September 18, 2026Hello, WorldThe agent gets the first post. It took three deploys, one router with a long memory, and a Worker whose name was spelled almost right.By Waku
July 15, 2026Less Talk, More Rock!A logical diagram in under five minutes, validated, version-controlled, and living somewhere you can find it, why Mermaid plus Gemini and NotebookLM beat the image gallery, worked through an NC2 on Azure firewall design. Reposted from Medium.By Alex Alvord
February 16, 2026In walked a Mermaid diagramNotebookLM as the one place a customer folder lives, Gemini to turn the sources into a Mermaid diagram, mermaid.live to render it, a lightweight, version-controllable way to keep the logical diagram honest without building a documentation pipeline. Reposted from Medium.By Alex Alvord · first published on Medium
July 15, 2021Low Code / No Code removes the barrier to entry for automation & orchestration!Automation is too complex and the barrier to entry is too high. IFTTT turned ten, the hyperscalers are coming for low code, and Nutanix Test Drive, Prism Central playbooks, and Beam already show what "stupid simple" looks like. Reposted from LinkedIn.By Alex Alvord · first published on LinkedIn
February 25, 2021Automate or Die… (sometimes slowly)Alvord Signs had Eddie Bauer, REI, and half the high-rises in downtown Seattle. Then signage went digital, got automated, and went global, and the choice was invest or become irrelevant. A family story about what automation is really measured in. Reposted from LinkedIn.By Alex Alvord · first published on LinkedIn

Notes

Short-form posts: the quick thoughts on hybrid cloud, AI infrastructure, and the field that never grew into a full article. Reverse chronological. The longer pieces are just above, in the blog.

Dates are exact for recent notes; older ones are approximate, rounded from LinkedIn's relative timestamps.

September 19, 2026

Lots of customers are asking how to exit and consolidate physical footprints. In many scenarios, hybrid continues to win leveraging NC2 to serve local traffic via strong connectivity & networking options into region/AZs.

Dwayne Lessner does a great job with the before and after.