§ 01 · Domain mastery

Cloud Architecture

Landing zones, migrations, and FinOps that survive the second budget cycle.

We design cloud footprints that hold up under audit, growth, and a change in CFO. Multi-account landing zones, defensible migration waves, DR that has actually been tested, and the FinOps discipline to keep spend honest — with the runbooks and evidence to prove it.

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§ I

Pillars

01

Landing zones that scale

Multi-account topologies, VPC and network segmentation, identity federation, and guardrails that don't need a ticket per exception.

02

Migrations with cutover runbooks

Wave-based rehost/refactor/replatform, ordered by blast radius. Cutover checklists, rollback paths, and dependency graphs the operators actually own.

03

FinOps as an operating rhythm

Cost attribution to features and pods, savings-plan strategy, unit economics dashboards a CFO can read, and monthly rightsizing that closes the loop.

04

DR with tested RTO and RPO

Recovery patterns picked to the workload — pilot light, warm standby, active/active — with drills on the calendar, not in the deck.

05

Compliance-shaped by default

SOC 2 and HIPAA controls mapped to the account and network layout on day one, so evidence is a byproduct of running the platform.

06

Reversible by design

Every change ships with an inverse: schema migrations with down paths, canary rollouts with automatic rollback, exit playbooks for every provider dependency.

§ II

Domain vocabulary

The words that separate insiders from readers.

Landing zoneThe word for the whole account-plus-network-plus-guardrails baseline. Misusing it as 'the VPC' outs you fast.
Blast radiusHow much breaks when one thing fails. Every architecture decision is really a bet on this number.
Well-Architected reviewAWS's five-pillar audit ritual. Insiders name individual pillars (usually Reliability or Cost) as shorthand for the argument.
NAT gateway taxEgress cost that shows up on the bill only after the workload grows. Naming it means you've been surprised by it.
Second budget cycleYear two, when the CFO returns and asks why cloud spend is where it is. Where most cloud programs quietly die.
Shared responsibilityThe line between what the cloud provider secures and what you secure. Every real incident starts with someone misreading it.
SCPService Control Policy. The AWS org-level guardrail that quietly prevents whole categories of mistake — or blocks a deploy for a week when misconfigured.
Cell-based architectureIsolate blast radius by carving traffic into cells. Names a pattern few teams actually implement despite citing it.
§ III

Open problems we help with

§ IV

What we ship

  1. 01A written architecture document — prose, not a slide deck — you keep.
  2. 02A landing zone in your accounts, wired to your SSO and observability.
  3. 03A migration wave plan with named owners and rollback runbooks.
  4. 04A FinOps dashboard with monthly rightsizing recommendations.
  5. 05A DR runbook that has been executed at least once.
  6. 06A handover: docs, dashboards, and a team that no longer needs us.
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