Enterprise Cloud
Precision.

What an engagement actually looks like.

Most of the work is AWS platform engineering for teams that already have something running. A migration that stalled, an EKS cluster nobody wants to touch, a bill that grew faster than the traffic did. The first week is usually reading Terraform and asking why, not writing anything.

Start from what breaks

Before any design work I want to know what has actually gone wrong in production and what the on-call rotation is tired of. That list is a better architecture brief than any requirements document, because it is the only part of the system that has been tested by reality. It also tells you which constraints are real and which ones are habits.

Terraform for anything that has to be repeated

Networking, IAM, clusters, pipelines and alerting all live in code, with state in S3 and locking on. Console changes are fine for looking around and bad for anything you will need again in six months. Where a platform spans several accounts I would rather spend the extra week on the account structure up front. Retrofitting it after the workloads land costs far more. Moving a workload between accounts later is a project, not a task.

Observability before scale

Autoscaling a system you cannot see is guessing with a bigger bill attached. Metrics, logs and traces go in first, along with alerts that page a person only when a person can do something. Most of the cost work I have done started with a dashboard rather than a spreadsheet. The savings were sitting in idle node groups and forgotten environments. Instance types were rarely the problem.

Hand it back

An engagement is finished when the client’s own engineers can change the thing without me. That means runbooks written for the person on call at 2am, diagrams that match what is deployed, and a walkthrough of the parts that will surprise them. The case studies below carry the numbers each of these platforms actually moved, and the blog covers the specific problems in more detail than a summary can.