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Poor infrastructure decisions can be the death of your startup or business!
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Jason Forte reposted thisJason Forte reposted thisI watched a kid with better work ethic and run a team better than some adults. Spent the day at a river clean-up with Andrew and the team from Making a Change. We were bagging up the rubbish when a bunch of kids who were playing football on a field next to the river came running over without us even asking, wanting to know if they could help. They popped on gloves and protective gear and got stuck in. They didn't just play around with us for a while; they really took initiative. I walked one of them through what I thought was the best way to bag the rubbish, and right away he was organising other kids, passing on what he learned, getting things moving. So many of these kids were eager to learn, eager to help, actually thinking critically about how they could do things better, and they really provided a lot of value to us and the team. It was bittersweet. I was standing there watching these kids that have all this potential, the curiosity and the grit and instinct to lead. And potentially, due to their environment and opportunities, might never reach what their potential allows from a career perspective. The same thought just kept running through my head: how do we make sure kids like this actually get a chance? Everything I do professionally is dedicated to one idea: helping people empower themselves through learning so they can live more fulfilling lives. Some people just need the opportunity. Cheers to Andrew, Dean and the Making a Change team for doing the work they do.
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Jason Forte shared thisIt's been a up-and-down journey but MakeOps Ltd is now officially a Select Tier Partner! Many thanks to those who helped along the way. We'll continue to deliver the best value partnership to companies running workloads on cloud. See comment for announcement!
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Jason Forte reposted thisJason Forte reposted thisYou know me as the tech-driven entrepreneur, constantly talking business and automation. And while that's true, there's a deeper passion I'm excited to share with you all. 🚀 A few years back, I founded and funded a charity of my own, and alongside an incredible small team, we've been on an amazing journey building it up. It's been a challenging yet profoundly rewarding experience, and recently, we pulled off one of our biggest projects yet! With the fantastic support of the City of Cape Town and the WCEDP, we successfully removed approximately 10 tonnes of trash from a local river! 🌍 This achievement truly highlights the power of collective action and our commitment to environmental stewardship. I'm incredibly proud of what we've accomplished and excited to share more about our ongoing efforts. 👇 #Charity #Community #EnvironmentalImpact #coct #wcedp photo by Kyle Kingsley Green
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Jason Forte posted thisA huge feature for those building software marketplaces was launched more than 4 months ago... As a whole new class of developers come online (assisted by AI), there will be more demand for APIs that can super charge their applications. Before AI it was common to cobble together different systems to build something new. I think this will happen the same way with AI. There are systems available via APIs that already do a great job, aren't expensive, and take care of a lot more complexity than we can see from the surface. Some of these are things like email systems, payment gateways, accounting software, e-commerce platforms fall into this category. I think platforms will emerge that offer APIs on demand. Not full SaaS apps. Just the API. That you can plug into your existing applications. One of the major challenges of building these types of applications is ensuring that data is segregated properly. They need to be multi-tenant aware. For those deploying on AWS, Lambda launched tenant isolation mode in November. This allows you to deploy a single Lambda function (behind an API Gateway) and service multiple tenants without cross mingling the data. You segregate by providing a tenantId and AWS takes care of the rest. For the operations of deploying and monitoring, things can be dramatically simplified. If you're building one of these marketplaces or gateways it's a no-brainer move to take a look at it and see if it works for you. Things are moving fast so make sure you're positioning your infra stack for what's around the corner. What's your thoughts? Link in the comments.
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Jason Forte shared thisAnother week another deprecated service. This time it's AppRunner I've used AppRunner for a lot of personal projects over the years. It was a great step to bring simplicity to container-based applications. What I liked over ECS was that it bundled costs like the load balancer, and made setting up TLS simple. The provisioned vs active pricing model was also cool, letting you spend less if your app was not as widely used. It wasn't quite scale-to-zero though. While AppRunner might be heading to EOL. The replacement may already be here... AWS Lambda recently launched managed instances and for those paying attention you can already run container images in Lambda for at least a few years now. For most, a switch to ECS will most likely have more complexity than AppRunner but with Lambda shipping at this velocity, it may come to the rescue of developers looking to simplify container deployments on AWS. Wild times!
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Jason Forte shared thisI'd recommend this role! Richard is great to work with and really passionate about startups.Jason Forte shared thisDo you want to work with me? I'm very nice, really. 😊 Do you want to help the next generation of UK startups? Do you already have great relationships/knowledge of the UK Startup and VC Ecosystem? Happy to chat to anyone interested in the below role: https://lnkd.in/eva5GjSeSenior Startup Investor Manager, VC, AWS, Startup Investor ManagementSenior Startup Investor Manager, VC, AWS, Startup Investor Management
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Jason Forte posted thisWhat has Amazon Bedrock, Odoo & 37signals taught me about designing APIs? AWS launched Bedrock back in Sept 2023. It was integrated into the existing IAM framework. For experienced AWS users, no problem. For everyone else? The friction to just start using the models prevented people from using the service. It was so complicated that I even made a YouTube video about it. Recently AWS launched API Keys for Bedrock and it's dramatically improved the on-boarding path. Lesson: Giving access to an API should be quick and easy and follow standards that users understand. In 2025 I was looking for accounting software, playing around with CRMs. I was drawn to Odoo because of their open source ethos. I tried it out and mostly it was good. Then I took a look at their API docs... Docs were non-existent and gated under their enterprise plan. I didn't even bother. Lesson: Poorly documented APIs and pay-to-play are deal breakers. Especially now that people are looking to leverage AI to extend your core software offerings. 37signals just launched agents for Basecamp - their project management tool. They're one of the OGs when it comes to focusing on great products that customers love. They could do this quickly because they already had a well defined API. CLI vs MCP doesn't matter if your API doesn't work or is badly designed. Lesson: If you have a stable, well designed API, you can extend it via an interface to meet the needs of agentic systems that are coming soon. Overall, there's a lot moving right now in the development ecosystem. But I think there are core fundamentals that still ring true. You should prioritize your API and if you don't have one you better move quickly.
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Jason Forte posted thisAWS Local Zones look good on the box but I've been finding some sharp edges recently... I've been deploying Local Zones with a client to help them meet some PII storage requirements. On the tin, it looks great, you get EC2 in locations and reliability where there's no full, multi-AZ region. You can use the same IaC too so operationally it seems simpler. Diving deeper though I've realized that a lot of the stuff I've taken for granted in regions need to be built from scratch in Local Zones. Some things that tripped me up: 1. No NAT Gateways: these get deployed in the parent region so you need to be careful about managing outbound traffic so you don't end up routing out via a different country / continent. 2. No S3: You can use the parent region but again for reliable storage, in country you need to have an alternative. I've gone with SeeweedFS for this - S3 compatible, runs in containers, works fine. 3. No RDS: I've had to haul out the sysadmin skills to manage backups more manually. This one hits hardest as having RDS manage snapshots is just a level of luxury I've grown accustomed to. 4. Lower-bound of instance sizes: This one is killer for small businesses. The minimum instance size in some Local Zones is t3.medium. To not blow up costs (which can be higher than region costs), you need to consider some kind of container solution. 5. Things take longer: Just by the nature of how Local Zones operate, it can take time for things to provision. Insufficient capacity is common for EC2 and it took 6 hours to provision one ALB. I had to retrofit the ECS optimised AMI due to timeouts on waiting for the metadata service to become available too Especially working at speed these things can become blockers if not considered in depth. All-in-all, these trade-offs are manageable when you're getting the consistency of EC2 as a platform. The upside is that ECS is still working like a trooper to help deploy seamlessly into these environments. It's fun to go deep on the basics and learn something new.
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Jason Forte shared thisEnd of support for AWS Copilot CLI is June I've worked with a few clients recently to deploy pipelines for ECS using GitHub Actions & CDK. It's not straight-forward. DM for a free call if you're caught out by this and need some next steps.
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Jason Forte reacted on thisJason Forte reacted on thisI've spent nearly 20 years securing systems that move money. Now I'm securing systems that make decisions. I took the stage at Amazon Web Services (AWS) Summit London -2026 to present "Red Team vs Blue Team: Securing AI Agents" with my brilliant colleague Ravikant Sharma and it felt like the culmination of everything I've been building towards. 16 years at Barclays. Enterprise Architect. Payment Security. PCI-DSS. Acquiring. Highly Regulated environments where a single misconfiguration doesn't just create a bug — it creates a headline. I want to take a moment to thank Barclays and colleagues at Barclaycard (Barclays Acquiring) for shaping the architect and security practitioner I am today. Working within one of the world's most demanding control frameworks — spanning assurance, compliance, payments security, and operational resilience — trained a mindset that you simply cannot learn from a textbook. The rigour of operating at that scale, under that level of scrutiny, for 16 years, fundamentally shaped how I think about risk, trust boundaries, and defence in depth. That subtle, hard-won knowledge is exactly what I bring to my customers at AWS every single day. It's the lens through which I now look at AI agents — autonomous systems that call tools, escalate privileges, chain decisions, and interact with other agents. The attack surface isn't just wider. It's alive. That's why designed this session around real, demonstrable attack vectors: 🔴 Prompt Injection — manipulating agent reasoning 🔴 Tool Poisoning — compromising the tools agents trust 🔴 Agent-to-Agent Privilege Escalation — agents granting each other too much power 🔴 Supply Chain Corruption — poisoning the ecosystem before deployment Real code. Real exploits. Real defences. No theory! 100+ architects, CTOs, and security practitioners packed the room — and the hallway conversations afterwards ran longer than the talk itself. That energy confirmed what I already knew: agentic security is the defining challenge of this era. And here's the thing — this was just the trailer. I'm committed to evangelising agentic security. More talks. More content. More frameworks. This isn't a side project — it's the mission. I like to thank every single person who showed up ready to challenge and learn. The feature film starts now. Stay tuned. 🎬 Sinan Erdem, Nicolas Tarducci , Victor Jansson, Harumi Hirata Palacios Abhijit KulkarniJohn Adelana #AgenticSecurity #AISecurity #AWSSummit #LondonSummit #AWSStartups #Barclays #SecurityArchitect #RedTeam #BlueTeam #Barclaycard #PaymentSecurity #EnterpriseSecurity
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Jason Forte liked thisJason Forte liked thisBREAKING: Jeff Bezos' $40bn AI lab is looking to expand to King’s Cross as yet ANOTHER AI company expands into the capital! 🇬🇧 It joins Anthropic, OpenAI and DeepMind which are all set up there. Project Prometheus is building AI that can understand the physical world and transform engineering and manufacturing and just closed a $10bn fundraising round at a $38bn valuation. The Financial Times has now reported that the company is looking at a 38,000 sq ft lease in King's Cross. This year has been a HUGE year for AI London with the top global companies massively expanding their presence here. LETS GO 🇬🇧 Interested in European Tech? Sign up to my newsletter to stay up to date: https://lnkd.in/d54jdWXP
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Jason Forte liked thisJason Forte liked thisManual inference optimization of generative AI models is costing AI teams 2-3 weeks per deployment, time that could be spent innovating. Amazon SageMaker AI changes this equation by automating recommendations on what used to require extensive manual benchmarking and configuration testing. The result? Production-ready inference recommendations in hours, with built-in cost-performance analysis. https://go.aws/4cDrEgCAmazon SageMaker AI now supports optimized generative AI inference recommendations | Amazon Web ServicesAmazon SageMaker AI now supports optimized generative AI inference recommendations | Amazon Web Services
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Jason Forte liked thisJason Forte liked thisI love cooking food, but these damn online recipes have always been driving me insane. Ads stacked on ads. Videos that start playing before the page loads. A 2,000-word personal essay about a holiday in Tuscany standing between you and a list of ingredients. I have spent years buying cookbooks to avoid it. Hundreds of them. I tried every recipe app going. Too expensive, too limited, or both. So I built something. The insight was simple: recipe data cannot be copyrighted. Ingredients, method, timings are factual information. They belong to everyone. So I built a crawler that extracts exactly that and discards everything else. A couple of days later I had a fully distributed architecture on Cloudflare, running at roughly 1/100th the cost of a conventional AWS setup. Reduced Recipes is live at https://reduced.recipes 170,000+ recipes and growing daily, every one stripped to its core. Recipes from all over the world, auto-detected and translated to English. Search by what is in your fridge. Rankings driven by engagement, not ad budgets. Shopping lists that merge quantities across multiple recipes automatically. Bookmarks, collections, and a cook mode built for the kitchen counter, not a desk. No account needed. No ads. No story about Tuscany. We will reach 1 million recipes within the month and are targeting 10 million within 6 months. At that point Reduced Recipes would be the largest recipe website by volume in the world. Would love to know what you think: https://reduced.recipes
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Jason Forte liked thisJoin me at AWS AI League 2026 Championship kicks off on 22 April! Builders will compete globally by constructing AI agents with Amazon Bedrock AgentCore, fine-tuning foundation models on Amazon SageMaker AI, and optimizing for accuracy and token efficiency all on a live leaderboard! The championship runs across 9 AWS Summits worldwide and virtually on AWS Builder Center, with top builders advancing to the Grand Finale at re:Invent in Las Vegas to win $50,000 prize pool and championship title on the line. Link in comments for the full challenge format, technical details & how to get involved Game on! #AWS AI League launches the ultimate builder innovation showdown. 🛡️🤖🏆 https://go.aws/4o10CF0 Craft prompts, customize models, solve real problems. Low-code interface levels the field. This is #generativeAI learning that sticks. Join today! #AIML
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Jason Forte liked thisJason Forte liked thisThere is always someone who could build what you are building. In fact, it is safe to assume someone is already building it right now. Sure, at some point, every founder needs to figure out how to make their solution defensible. But if founders listened to every "what if" from the sidelines, we’d never have crazy ideas to begin with. The best "what if" still is: What if this actually works? Great callout by Andrew Chen
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Jason Forte liked thisJason Forte liked thisOver centuries, Cape Town's coastline has undergone dramatic transformation. In the mid-1960s, the City of Cape Town reclaimed the Woodstock beach to support its expansion development plans. Today, Woodstock is one of Cape Town’s most exciting creative hubs but the formerly vibrant beach no longer exists. In 2017, property developer Blok invited us to participate in a competition for urban design services for the Woodstock Precinct. We responded to the challenge with our vision for the Woodstock Beach Precinct Urban Design Framework. Follow the link in the comments below for full project details and to see our vision for reinstating the Woodstock Beach. Part of 10N Collective created by Egis Group.
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Jason Forte liked thisEvery city needs a maker meetup A place for bootstrappers, makers and founders to come together and ship Well done Leo K. for making it happen in Cape Town! A beautiful city full of smart, ambitious people :)Jason Forte liked thisJust over a month ago Olly Meakings mentioned something like this could work. It resonated, so we ran with it. We started a co-work day for makers & founders around Cape Town. Some awesome people, solving interesting challenges, sitting around a table and getting shit done. The format is simple: - Introductions (what you're building + what you want to get done today) - Heads down and cook - Demos at the end We've done 4 events so far, with the last one being our biggest. Can't speak for the others, but I left feeling super motivated. If you're based in or around Cape Town and you're actively building something, drop a comment or DM me. We're doing the next one in 2 weeks time, would love to have you there! (Shout out to Tom Radford and Hen Vance for being cool and joining the first one🤘 )
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