Simor

Data Infrastructure for Production AI

Practical writing on AI data engineering, feature stores, and the infrastructure choices that determine whether AI systems work in production.

When your AI vendor goes bankrupt — surviving platform lock-in
When your AI vendor goes bankrupt — surviving platform lock-in
23 Jun, 2026 | 05 Mins read

A healthcare analytics company received notice on a Tuesday afternoon that their primary AI infrastructure vendor was filing for Chapter 7 bankruptcy. The platform hosted their patient risk stratifica

Open-source sustainability: who pays for the code everyone uses?
Open-source sustainability: who pays for the code everyone uses?
22 Jun, 2026 | 05 Mins read

A critical open-source library used by thousands of companies, including several Fortune 500 firms, is maintained by one person in their spare time. This is not a hypothetical. It is a description of

Designing guardrails: a practical architecture guide
Designing guardrails: a practical architecture guide
21 Jun, 2026 | 06 Mins read

The guardrail problem in AI is a tension between two failure modes. Too few guardrails and the system produces harmful, inaccurate, or brand-damaging outputs. Too many guardrails and the system refuse

The death of the dashboard: what replaces BI?
The death of the dashboard: what replaces BI?
20 Jun, 2026 | 03 Mins read

The traditional BI dashboard — a grid of charts that a business user opens every morning to check KPIs — is losing its grip on how organizations consume data. The decline is not dramatic. No one decla

Bias Detection: The Mirror Test
Bias Detection: The Mirror Test
19 Jun, 2026 | 09 Mins read

You hold up a mirror to see if there is something on your face. The mirror does not clean your face. It does not tell you how to live. It reflects what is there so you can judge whether what is there

Model serving: vLLM, TGI, Triton — which fits your stack?
Model serving: vLLM, TGI, Triton — which fits your stack?
18 Jun, 2026 | 05 Mins read

Serving a language model in production is an infrastructure problem, not a model problem. The model weights are the same regardless of how you serve them. What differs is throughput (how many requests

Why 'AI engineer' is the fastest-growing job title (and what it means)
Why 'AI engineer' is the fastest-growing job title (and what it means)
17 Jun, 2026 | 04 Mins read

LinkedIn's latest workforce report shows "AI engineer" as the fastest-growing job title for the third consecutive quarter. Job postings containing the title increased 280% year-over-year. The growth r

Data mesh in practice: year 2 retrospective
Data mesh in practice: year 2 retrospective
16 Jun, 2026 | 05 Mins read

An insurance company with $400 million in premium volume adopted data mesh two years ago. The central data team had become a bottleneck. Every business unit — claims, underwriting, actuarial, and dist

The invisible infrastructure: why data plumbing matters more than models
The invisible infrastructure: why data plumbing matters more than models
15 Jun, 2026 | 05 Mins read

A Fortune 500 company hired a team of twelve machine learning engineers and tasked them with building a predictive maintenance system for their manufacturing floor. The ML team spent four months evalu