AWS Certified Solutions Architect

    What I do on AWS

    I design, secure and run production workloads on AWS. Most of the work is one of six things, and most of it starts by reading an account that nobody has looked at closely in a while.

    Architecture

    Account and network design, multi-account structure, and the Well-Architected trade-offs behind them — written down, so the reasoning survives the person who made it.

    Migrations

    Moving workloads onto AWS, or between accounts and regions, without a weekend of downtime. Usually the hard part is the data and the DNS, not the servers.

    Cost

    Finding the spend that is not buying anything — idle capacity, forgotten environments, storage tiers, egress — and evidencing each saving line by line rather than quoting a percentage.

    Security & IAM

    Least-privilege roles, removing standing admin, closing escalation paths, and making sure the audit trail is on and cannot quietly be turned off.

    Operations

    Monitoring and alerting that pages a human for things that matter and stays quiet otherwise, plus the runbooks that make an incident boring.

    Automation

    Infrastructure as code, deployment pipelines, and the small pieces of glue that remove a recurring manual job from someone's week.

    How I work

    Read the account first

    Every engagement starts by looking at what is actually deployed — not at a diagram of what someone believes is deployed. The two are rarely the same.

    Scope before work

    You get the plan and what it will take before anything is touched, so there is no open-ended meter running.

    Leave it maintainable

    Changes come with the reasoning written down. If I disappeared, your team should be able to pick up the account and keep going.

    Eighteen years of it

    Systems engineer since 2007, an MBA, and AWS Certified Solutions Architect. The longer version — the roles, the certifications and how it fits together — is on the about page.

    My background

    From the blog

    Practical guides and field notes on AWS, cloud teams, and engineering leadership.

    Talk it through

    If you have an AWS account that needs a look — cost, security, a migration, or just a second opinion on an architecture — a half hour is usually enough to tell whether I can help.