Podman is the better-designed container engine and Docker is the better-supported one. A working engineer's comparison: the architectural difference that drives everything, where each one wins and loses, the four things that genuinely break in a migration (compose, the Docker socket, privileged ports, restart on boot), and a decision procedure to run against your own setup.
Running Docker Compose in production is a reasonable choice for a single host, but the defaults were chosen for a laptop. A walk through the failure families that actually bite: the deploy gap, unrotated logs filling the disk, anonymous volumes, published ports that bypass your firewall, secrets in environment variables, and health checks that report without acting.
Asked how many open opportunities an account had, the assistant said five. It had nineteen. Retrieval returned five chunks and the model counted them. CRM data is structured and RAG is built for text, so the preparation work is mostly deciding which questions are retrieval and which are queries.
"It works" and "it's ready" are different claims. Integrations rarely fail on launch day; they fail in week six, when the token expires and someone adds a field. A readiness checklist for Salesforce AWS integrations, with a pass test on every item.
A PersistentVolumeClaim sounds like paperwork. Delete one on a cluster with the default reclaim policy and the underlying disk goes with it. A short guide to the parts of Kubernetes storage that bite: reclaim policies, access modes, zone affinity and StatefulSets.
Three hours into an ingress controller upgrade for an application that is one Go binary and a Postgres database. Nothing is broken. The cluster has just become the thing you operate. An honest look at what Kubernetes costs, when it earns that cost, and what to run instead.
Semantic search finds the most persuasive document, not the earliest one. Here is how to architect an AI construction claims and dispute intelligence platform on AWS so retrieval respects the contractual clock, schedule data stays out of the vector index, every answer resolves to a page, and privileged material never shares a retrieval path with project records.
AppFlow won the spreadsheet at two integrations. Eighteen months and forty flows later it's a line item that gets mentioned in the monthly review. These three options aren't three prices, they're three cost shapes, and the crossover is the whole decision.
The error count was zero every day for three weeks. So was the invocation count. A stopped integration and a healthy one produce identical graphs, and every CloudWatch default is tuned to stay quiet when data stops arriving. Four signals worth emitting, and the alarm config that actually fires.
"EC2 – Other" is the third largest line on the bill and you run no EC2 instances. That's NAT gateway charges from a pipeline that is entirely Lambda, S3 and Athena. Five levers for cutting the AWS cost of Salesforce data pipelines, in the order worth pulling them.