How do engagements start?

Always with a 30-minute discovery call. We talk through your situation, share initial thoughts, and if it's a fit we scope the right engagement. Every call is a paid, focused session. You always get a clear quote first.

Do you work with my cloud or stack?

Almost certainly. We work across AWS, Azure and GCP, Kubernetes, Terraform and OpenTofu, plus the full CI/CD and observability ecosystem. If it runs in production, someone on the team has probably operated it.

How does payment work?

Fixed-scope work like the Power Hour and Audit is paid upfront via secure checkout. Retainers are invoiced monthly. You always get a clear quote before anything starts.

Can you work with my existing team?

That's the goal. We embed with your engineers, pair, document, and hand things over so your team grows stronger. We aim to make ourselves unnecessary, not indispensable.

Are you available for short or urgent work?

Yes. The Power Hour is perfect for a focused problem or a fast second opinion. For incidents or urgent reviews, mention it when you book and we'll prioritize.

How to Reduce Your AWS Bill: A Practical Checklist

A field-tested checklist for cutting AWS costs, ordered from the fastest, safest wins to the deeper structural changes.

If your AWS bill keeps climbing faster than your revenue, you are not alone. The good news is that most accounts have a lot of slack in them. Here is the checklist I work through with clients, ordered so you bank the fast, safe wins first and leave the structural changes for later.

1. Get visibility before you touch anything

You cannot cut what you cannot see. Turn on Cost Explorer, enforce a tagging policy by team and environment, and find the line items that make up the top 80 percent of your bill. Almost every time, the spend is concentrated in a handful of services.

2. Delete the obvious waste

This is the part nobody enjoys but everyone benefits from. Hunt down unattached EBS volumes, old snapshots, idle load balancers, unused Elastic IPs, and forgotten dev environments that have been running for months.

# Find unattached EBS volumes that are still costing you money
aws ec2 describe-volumes \
  --filters Name=status,Values=available \
  --query 'Volumes[].{ID:VolumeId,Size:Size,AZ:AvailabilityZone}' \
  --output table

3. Right-size compute and storage

Look for instances sitting under 20 percent CPU and memory and bring them down a size. Move gp2 volumes to gp3 for a cheaper, faster default. Add S3 lifecycle rules to push cold data into Infrequent Access and Glacier.

4. Schedule non-production

Your dev and staging environments rarely need to run nights and weekends. Shutting them down outside working hours can cut their cost by more than half on its own.

5. Commit to your baseline

Once your usage is stable and right-sized, cover your steady-state with Savings Plans or Reserved Instances. Never commit your peak. If you are not sure which to buy, I wrote a full breakdown in Savings Plans vs Reserved Instances.

6. Modernize where it pays

Move stateless workloads to Graviton and spot capacity. Right-size your Fargate tasks. These architectural wins often beat anything you can do with rate negotiation alone.

7. Add guardrails so it stays fixed

Savings evaporate without guardrails. Set budget alerts per team, enforce tagging, block expensive resource types by default, and run a short monthly cost review.

Work top to bottom and a 20 to 40 percent reduction is realistic without putting reliability at risk. If you want a number specific to your account, try the cloud cost savings calculator or book a cost review.