AWS & DevOps

Somebody should actually own your infrastructure.

Your application lives on servers, and someone needs to know how they work, watch them, and answer for them. If your AWS setup grew one decision at a time and nobody’s sure what’s running anymore — that’s the problem I fix, and then keep fixed.

Talk about your setup →

Sound familiar?

The AWS bill goes up a little every month, and nobody can say exactly why.
Deployments are a ritual only one person knows — or worse, that person’s gone.
You think there are backups. Nobody has ever tried restoring one.
The last time the site went down, you found out from a customer.
There’s a vague worry that the whole thing is held together with old decisions no one remembers making.

None of this means anyone did anything wrong. It means the infrastructure grew faster than the ownership. That’s normal — and fixable.

What I set up and run

Environments done right — production, staging, and a sane way to tell them apart. Changes get tested where mistakes are free, not on your customers.
Deployments without drama — pushing an update becomes a routine, repeatable, reversible act. No more Friday-afternoon rituals, no more “only Dave knows how.”
Backups you can trust — automated, stored separately from the things they protect, and actually test-restored on a schedule. An untested backup is a hope, not a plan.
Monitoring and alerts — servers, applications, certificates, disk space, the works. When something needs attention, I hear about it before you do — and long before your customers.
Security basics, enforced — access keys rotated, old accounts closed, permissions trimmed to what’s actually needed. Most cloud breaches walk in through doors nobody remembered were open.
Documentation — what runs where, why, and how to operate it, written down. Your infrastructure shouldn’t live in anyone’s head — including mine.

Strip the jargon and DevOps is one thing: fewer surprises. You’re not paying for technology — you’re paying for the boring, predictable operation of the systems your revenue depends on. Boring is the deliverable.

About that AWS bill

Most AWS accounts I open for the first time are paying 20–40% more than they need to. Not through anything exotic — through servers sized for traffic that never came, resources someone spun up for a test and forgot, storage nobody’s looked at in years, and instances running around the clock for workloads that happen twice a day.

A cost review is often the cheapest way to meet me: a fixed-price audit that typically finds its own fee several times over. The savings are yours either way — there’s no percentage cut, no incentive for me to inflate the findings.

Get a cost review →

Two ways to engage

Setup project

Your infrastructure, brought to the standard above: environments, deployments, backups, monitoring, security, documentation. Fixed scope, quoted price, and at the end your business owns a clean, documented setup — whether or not we keep working together.

Ongoing management

I run it: monitoring answered, updates applied, costs watched, questions about “can our infrastructure handle X?” answered by someone who knows it cold. This is the same care my hosting clients have relied on for years.

FAQ

We’re not on AWS — can you still help?

Yes. The principles (and most of the tooling) carry across providers, and I regularly work with traditional hosting too. AWS is simply where most of my infrastructure work lives.

Can you take over an AWS account someone else set up?

That’s the most common starting point. First step is always the same: audit what exists, document it, then improve it in place. Nothing gets rebuilt for the sake of rebuilding — the same philosophy as my application work.

Do we need “the cloud” at all?

Maybe not, and I’ll say so. A business with steady traffic and simple needs can be better served by simpler hosting at a fraction of the cost. The right infrastructure is the one that fits — not the one with the best logo.

Who owns the accounts?

You do. Root account, billing, domains — registered to your business, always. Same principle as everything else I do: I hold keys you gave me; I don’t hold you.

Not sure what state your infrastructure is in?

That’s the most common starting point there is. Tell me what you know — even if it’s just “we pay Amazon something every month” — and I’ll help you find out the rest.

Get in touch →