Operate & Optimize
A managed AWS services and cost-optimization offering that keeps environments healthy, observable, and affordable — while engineering teams stay focused on shipping features.
The goal of Operate & Optimize is simple: turn “we’ll deal with it later” cloud operations into a disciplined, calm practice — with clear alerting, cost visibility, and runbooks that anyone on the team can follow.
Role
Cloud Operations Lead · Cost Optimization Partner
Tech Stack
AWS (CloudWatch, Budgets, Cost Explorer, GuardDuty), Terraform / IaC, Lambda, EventBridge, dashboards & runbooks
Highlights
Cost guardrails · 24/7 monitoring patterns · Clear SLOs & runbooks · Non-disruptive rollout
Overview
Many teams land in AWS with a working product but no clear way to keep it healthy and affordable over time. In Operate & Optimize, I work with stakeholders to put structure around day-to-day operations: what we watch, how we react, and how we keep costs from quietly creeping up.
Instead of hoping that CloudWatch alarms and invoices “look fine,” the environment gets a lightweight operating model: SLOs, dashboards, alerts, and regular reviews that keep leaders informed without pulling engineers into fire-drills.
Operating model
The operating model is built in small, safe steps so it can be adopted by busy teams:
- Health baselining: map key services, traffic patterns, and existing pain points (incidents, slow pages, noisy alerts).
- SLOs & signals: define a short list of availability and performance SLOs, then wire them into CloudWatch dashboards and alerts that actually mean something.
- Runbooks: document “first response” checklists for typical issues (spikes, failed deploys, queue backlogs) so on-call engineers aren’t starting from zero.
- Weekly reviews: short operations & cost reviews to catch issues early and agree on small, continuous improvements.
Cost optimization approach
Cost work is intentionally practical and low-drama. The goal is to fund product work, not to chase discounts for their own sake.
- Visibility first: enable AWS Cost Explorer, Budgets, and simple reports per environment / product, so spend is no longer a mystery.
- Quick wins: right-size instances, clean up unused resources, and tune storage / retention policies before talking about reservations or commitments.
- Guardrails: budgets and alerts for “unexpected” growth, with a clear escalation path instead of last-minute invoice surprises.
- Sustainable patterns: standardize a few patterns (for logging, metrics, backups, multi-AZ, etc.) so every new workload starts in a good shape.
Impact
After the Operate & Optimize engagement, teams typically:
- Have a clear picture of what “healthy” looks like in AWS.
- Receive fewer, higher-quality alerts — and know exactly what to do when they fire.
- Can explain cloud spend to finance and leadership with simple, trusted numbers.
- On-call engineers feel supported by dashboards, runbooks, and automation instead of “tribal knowledge.”
The result is a calmer, more transparent cloud environment where teams can focus on building — with the confidence that operations and cost will not become the next emergency.