Services

1. The AWS Cost Audit

A fixed fee, agreed up front. Two weeks.

A focused engagement that quantifies exactly where your AWS spend is leaking and ranks every finding by dollar impact, effort and risk. It is the usual door-opener, and most clients move on to project work or a retainer afterwards. More on AWS cost optimization and what the audit finds.

How it works

• Day 0, kickoff. 30-minute call to align on scope and access. You deploy a read-only IAM role via the CloudFormation template we provide.
• Days 1 to 5, analysis. Cost Explorer, CloudWatch metrics, configuration review, instance and storage inventory, architecture mapping. No production access required.
• Days 6 to 8, report. We write a 25 to 40 page report: executive summary, current state, findings ranked, 30/60/90-day roadmap, reliability and security flags, next steps.
• Day 9, internal QA. Every dollar figure and risk rating is reviewed before delivery.
• Day 10, findings review. 90-minute call walking your leadership team through every finding.
• Days 13 to 15, follow-up. Discuss the roadmap and whether a longer engagement makes sense.

2. Project work

Fixed price, agreed after a scoping call.

A defined piece of work with a start, an end and something real at the end of it. This is where the design and build work lives. Typical engagements:

• Architecture and design. Designing a new system on AWS before it gets built, or reviewing a design you already have while changing it is still cheap. You get the diagram, the service choices, the reasoning behind each one, and the honest list of what it will not handle.
• Greenfield build. Standing up the whole environment: networking, compute, database, storage, secrets, deployment pipeline, all defined in Terraform so it can be rebuilt from the repository instead of from memory.
• Migration. Onto AWS, between regions, or off a service that is quietly costing you. Sequenced in stages, each one reversible, so you are never stuck halfway.
• Reliability hardening. Deployment safety and automatic rollback, a backup and restore path someone has actually tested, and monitoring that catches problems before your customers report them.
• Security and data residency review. IAM permissions cut back to what is genuinely needed, secrets moved out of environment variables and source control, encryption where it matters, and for Canadian clients, a straight answer about where the data physically sits.
• Automation. The recurring manual work that eats an engineer's week, moved into Lambda, EventBridge or Step Functions.

Every project starts with a short scoping call, followed by a written proposal setting out the deliverables, a fixed price and a delivery date. No hourly billing, no open-ended meters.

3. Embedded fractional AWS engineering

For teams that need ongoing AWS expertise without carrying a full-time hire. We work as your embedded AWS lead: in your Slack, on your code reviews, in the architecture decisions, and doing the implementation. Most clients start here after an audit or a project. How fractional AWS engineering works.

The size of the commitment is set to match what you actually need, from light advisory presence through to deep weekly involvement, and it can move up or down as your roadmap changes. We work that out on the call rather than fitting you to a package.

Retainers run on a short initial commitment, then continue month to month with 30 days' notice on either side.

Scope