Cloud Infrastructure

Cloud infrastructure work covers the architecture and provisioning underneath everything else on AWS — networking, compute, and storage, and the Infrastructure-as-Code that defines it. Done properly, an environment should be reproducible from Git alone, not held together by configuration nobody’s written down.

In practice: Terraform-defined infrastructure, Ansible for configuration management, and Packer for reproducible machine images — changes that are version-controlled and reviewable, rather than made by hand and remembered later.

Problems this usually starts from

These are the kinds of things that usually prompt someone to get in touch:

• Infrastructure changes get made by hand in the console and remembered later, if at all.
• There’s no single source of truth for what’s actually running versus what’s documented.
• Scaling under load means guessing rather than having capacity already planned for.
• Environments have drifted apart — staging looks nothing like production anymore.
• Machine images are built and patched manually instead of reproducibly.
• Nobody’s confident a full environment could be rebuilt from scratch if it had to be.
• Costs keep creeping up and nobody’s quite sure which resources are actually still in use.

What an engagement looks like

Starts with understanding what’s actually running on AWS today, and how far that’s drifted from what’s documented or version-controlled. From there: Terraform-defined infrastructure, Ansible for configuration management, and Packer for reproducible machine images — changes that go through review instead of being made by hand.

Scope is either a fixed piece of work (bringing one environment under Infrastructure-as-Code, an architecture review) or an ongoing placement. Deliverables are concrete: infrastructure that’s version-controlled, reviewable, and could be rebuilt from Git if it had to be.

Typical work looks like: Terraform modules structured so environments stay genuinely identical instead of quietly diverging over time; Packer-built images that don’t need hand-patching after launch; and Ansible playbooks that replace “someone SSHs in and fixes it” with something that runs the same way twice, reviewed the same way as everything else already going through Git.

Engagements typically run anywhere from a few days for a specific fix up to several months for an ongoing placement — there’s no minimum contract length, and scope can start small and grow once it’s clear the working relationship fits.