AWS
AWS architecture matched to actual load, not assumed scale.
AWS is the right choice when you need breadth — managed databases, event-driven compute, global CDN, and a compliance paper trail all under one billing account. The real cost of misuse isn't the AWS bill; it's the operational complexity that accumulates when services are chosen for familiarity instead of fit.
The two failure modes I see repeatedly: teams that treat AWS like a hosting provider — EC2 instances provisioned by hand, no IaC, no cost visibility — and teams that benchmark against Netflix and deploy EKS before they have meaningful traffic. I've worked through both and the damage they leave behind. My default is IaC from day one, either CDK when the team is TypeScript-native or Terraform when the environment is polyglot. Service selection follows actual load patterns: I'd rather instrument first and see where the bottlenecks are than architect for hypothetical scale. Cost modeling is part of the design phase, not an afterthought — I use Cost Explorer and reservation coverage reports to make tradeoff decisions concrete before committing to a service. I've navigated the AWS maturity curve from initial deployment through SOC 2 readiness, and the consistent finding is that discipline on IAM boundaries and observability early makes every subsequent phase easier.
Architecture Design
I work through Well-Architected tradeoffs explicitly — reliability vs. cost, operational simplicity vs. flexibility — and make those decisions visible in the IaC rather than leaving them as tribal knowledge. The framework is a useful checklist, not a prescription.
Cost Analysis
I start with Cost Explorer to identify the top spending categories, then look at reservation coverage, savings plan utilization, and data transfer costs — the last one is routinely underestimated. Rightsizing decisions get made against actual CloudWatch metrics, not instance type intuition.
IaC Migration
I migrate click-ops AWS environments incrementally using Terraform import or CDK's L1 constructs to bring existing resources under state management without recreation. The goal is never a big-bang rewrite — it's getting each resource versioned and reviewable without a service disruption.
SaaS Product Infrastructure
Multi-tenant SaaS with tenant isolation enforced at the IAM and network boundary, RDS with read replicas, ElastiCache for session and query caching, and CloudFront in front of static assets and API responses where TTLs allow.
Event-Driven Data Pipelines
SQS, SNS, Lambda, and S3 for processing workloads that are too bursty for always-on servers. Dead-letter queues and Lambda destination configs handle failure cases so nothing is silently dropped.
SOC 2 Compliance
AWS Config rules for continuous compliance monitoring, CloudTrail with log integrity validation, GuardDuty for threat detection, and Security Hub to aggregate findings across accounts. The controls map to the Trust Services Criteria directly.
Let's talk AWS.
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