Build on the cloud. Adopt AI that actually pays off.
Goldwater.dev is a practitioner's field guide to cloud architecture and pragmatic AI — clear, hype-free playbooks for shipping reliable systems and putting AI to real work.
- No-hype
- Pragmatic over trendy
- Battle-tested
- From real systems
- Open
- Free to read, always
What you'll find here
Four tracks, one philosophy: ship what works.
Cloud Architecture
Reference patterns for scalable, resilient systems — without the over-engineering.
Pragmatic AI
Where AI actually earns its keep, how to ship it, and how to avoid expensive dead ends.
Platform & DevOps
Infrastructure as code, CI/CD, and the operational glue that keeps teams fast.
Cost & Reliability
Tuning for the bill and the pager — practical FinOps and SRE that scales.
Start here
Featured
Stop Picking a Model. Pick a Control Plane.
Two smart teams burned three hours debating Gemini vs. Claude — the wrong meeting. In 2026 the durable enterprise AI decision isn't the model, it's the control plane you standardize on.
Read articleFeatured labYour First Agent with Google's Agent Development Kit
Build your first agent with Google's open-source Agent Development Kit — instructions, a tool, and a local run loop you can actually execute.
Start lab
Who's behind this
Hi, I'm Wes Goldwater.
An engineering leader based in Austin, Texas, writing the no-hype playbook for cloud and pragmatic AI. Everything here comes from real systems — the deploys that broke, the bills that surprised, and the AI work that actually paid off.
More about me“The best architecture is the simplest one that survives next year. The best AI feature is the one that quietly earns its cost.”
— the operating principle behind every guide on Goldwater.dev
From the resource
Latest articles
Your AI Policy Is a PDF. Make It Executable.
Acceptable-use PDFs don't govern agents — permission scopes, tool allowlists, hooks, and CI gates do. Move policy from the wiki into configuration where it's enforced by default.
August 7, 2026You're Paying for the Same AI Five Times
GitHub, Atlassian, Slack, your IDE, and your cloud provider each sell you the same assistant. An overlap audit and a 'one primary tool per job' rule beats consolidating by inertia.
August 5, 2026Kill Your Pilot
AI pilots without an end date become permanent budget lines that never produce a decision. Every pilot needs graduation criteria, a kill date, and a named owner accountable for calling it.
August 3, 2026Build it to understand it
Hands-on labs
Interoperability Capstone: MCP, A2A & Microsoft 365
Tie a Foundry agent to the open ecosystem and the surfaces your users live in: consume MCP tools, interoperate with peers over A2A, and publish the agent into Microsoft 365 — managed core, open edges.
Start labFine-tuning & Model Customization
Customize the model itself — fine-tuning, distillation, and GPT-5 RFT — and, just as important, learn when not to. Prepare data, run a job, and prove the customized model beats the base before shipping.
Start labAn engineering leader in your corner.
I partner with teams on cloud architecture, platform strategy, and pragmatic AI adoption — turning the noise into decisions that move reliability, cost, and speed.
The Goldwater dispatch
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