The demo-to-production gapReal pain, not abstract architecture talk.
Most teams don't need more cloud jargon. They need to know what's expensive, what's fragile, what slows users down, and what can be safely changed this week.
CostThe AWS bill is growing, but no one knows which system is causing it.
Finance sees the number. Engineering sees hundreds of services. Nobody has a safe first move.
I start with cost allocation, idle inventory, traffic shape, and commitment risk before touching architecture.
GenAIThe GenAI demo worked, but production quality, latency, and cost are unstable.
The feature looks impressive in a meeting and then becomes expensive, slow, or untrusted with real users.
I inspect retrieval, context design, evals, fallbacks, and cost per request before blaming the model.
DeploysDeployments are risky and rollback is unclear.
Every release needs extra human attention. That slows the team and creates fear.
First I check blast radius, deployment path, stateful dependencies, and rollback ownership.
ObservabilityObservability exists, but debugging still takes hours.
Dashboards are present, but incidents still become log archaeology and Slack guessing.
I connect symptoms to traces, metrics, logs, ownership, and alarms that point to action.
IAM & envsIAM and environments grew organically, and every change now feels risky.
Permission changes become production incidents waiting to happen, and nobody wants to clean them up.
I define account boundaries, environment contracts, permission guardrails, and IaC ownership.
ScaleThe platform works today, but no one trusts it at 10x traffic.
Growth becomes a threat because failure modes, queues, database limits, and on-call paths are vague.
I model what fails first, then build guardrails around scale, retries, backpressure, and recovery.