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.

The procurement checklist for AI vendors
The procurement checklist for AI vendors
26 Jul, 2026 | 07 Mins read

AI vendor procurement is where organizations make binding commitments that are expensive to unwind. A three-year contract with a model provider locks you into their pricing, their rate limits, their m

The $100B AI infrastructure buildout — who benefits?
The $100B AI infrastructure buildout — who benefits?
25 Jul, 2026 | 03 Mins read

The combined AI infrastructure capital expenditure of the four largest cloud providers exceeded $100 billion in the trailing twelve months. Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Meta are building data center

Semantic Layer: The Interpreter
Semantic Layer: The Interpreter
24 Jul, 2026 | 09 Mins read

Two executives sit across a table. One speaks Japanese. One speaks German. The interpreter sits between them, translating in both directions. The executives do not need to know each other's languages.

The modern data stack is dead — here's what replaced it
The modern data stack is dead — here's what replaced it
23 Jul, 2026 | 05 Mins read

The modern data stack was a marketing category that outlived its usefulness. Between 2019 and 2023, it described a specific architecture: Fivetran or Airbyte for ingestion, dbt for transformation, Sno

Prompt management tools: PromptLayer, Humanloop, Promptfoo
Prompt management tools: PromptLayer, Humanloop, Promptfoo
22 Jul, 2026 | 05 Mins read

Prompts are code. They have versions, they break when changed carelessly, and they need testing. Yet most teams manage prompts as string literals in source files or as unversioned entries in a databas

Legacy mainframe to cloud-native: the data migration they said was impossible
Legacy mainframe to cloud-native: the data migration they said was impossible
21 Jul, 2026 | 06 Mins read

An insurance company running on an IBM mainframe had accumulated forty years of policy data in VSAM files and DB2 tables. The mainframe processed 600,000 transactions per day across policy administrat

What ancient engineering principles teach us about AI architecture
What ancient engineering principles teach us about AI architecture
20 Jul, 2026 | 05 Mins read

The Pont du Gard in southern France has carried water across the Gardon river valley for two thousand years. It was built without steel reinforcement, without concrete, and without computer-aided stru

Capacity planning for vector databases
Capacity planning for vector databases
19 Jul, 2026 | 07 Mins read

Vector database capacity planning fails in predictable ways. Teams estimate storage based on vector count alone and discover at 60% capacity that memory consumption is growing faster than disk because

Agentic AI in production: hype vs reality check
Agentic AI in production: hype vs reality check
18 Jul, 2026 | 03 Mins read

Agentic AI — systems where language models plan, execute multi-step tasks, and use tools autonomously — is the dominant topic at every AI conference, vendor pitch, and engineering blog. The hype is in