AWS gets weird at scale.
I help organizations get to the bottom of difficult AWS problems. I spent nearly seven years at AWS as a Senior Technical Account Manager and Senior Solutions Architect, mostly with banks and telecoms. Now I’m an independent consultant.
Prefer to talk? Book a 20-minute call.
Kulshan (Mt Baker), from the Fraser Valley
What I help with
The hard AWS problems rarely belong to one team. Finance owns the bill, engineering owns the architecture, the platform team owns the accounts, and nobody owns the whole answer. That’s usually where I come in.
AWS bills
The bill went up and nobody can say why. I go through the billing data and the accounts behind it until there’s an answer you can check for yourself. This is the most common way in.
Landing zones and governance
Accounts, OUs, guardrails and access that grew without a plan. I help you work out what you actually have, and what to change first.
Networking and migrations
I started in networking, so VPC design, data transfer costs and migrations that got messier than planned are familiar ground.
Also a second opinion before an architecture, landing zone or commitment decision, networking and infrastructure faults that are hard to pin down, and anything where AWS, cost and several teams have got tangled together.
How it works
- You email me or book a call. A few sentences is enough: what changed, what you’ve tried, and what decision is waiting on it.
- We talk for 20 minutes. The call is free. It’s for working out the real question and whether I’m the right person for it, not for doing the investigation.
- We agree the scope in writing. The question, the evidence and access I need, the deliverable, the timeline, the fee and the payment terms. Nothing starts until you’ve agreed to it.
- I investigate and write it up. A bounded investigation can deliver a written answer in seven business days, depending on the agreed scope and the evidence available. You get the answer, the evidence that supports it, any evidence against it, what’s still missing, how confident I am, and the decisions it points to. I don’t promise savings or a particular outcome.
- Anything further is scoped separately. Architecture, networking, migration, governance, implementation or advisory work that follows gets its own written scope, and implementation access is agreed on its own terms.
Where I can, I work with read-only access, and you stay in control of your data. How I handle access and data.
I’m happy to work alongside your own engineers or another consultancy, with who does what agreed up front. If you’re an advisor with a client problem outside your lane, introductions are welcome.
Why did network spend go up 34% month over month in the platform account?
- Hypothesis
- NAT Gateway data processing is the main contributor.
- Supporting evidence
- The movement is in NAT Gateway data processing, not a general EC2 increase. Two independent anomaly checks agree.
- Contradicting evidence
- None identified in the billing and anomaly evidence reviewed.
- Missing evidence
- Billing data alone doesn’t show which workload sent the traffic, where it went, or whether it was expected.
- Confidence and limits
- Strong on the cost driver, low on cause and ownership. No savings estimate.
- Recommended next decision
- Hold architecture changes until the traffic is attributed to a workload.
About me
I started out splicing fibre and racking switches, then moved into network engineering, migrations and DDoS mitigation.
After that I spent nearly seven years at AWS as a Senior TAM and Senior Solutions Architect, working with national banks, telecoms and other large customers on landing zones, incidents and architecture reviews. From 2019 on, a lot of that work was about the bill.
Mission FinOps is just me, working from Mission, BC, on Stó:lō land. You deal with me directly. I don’t resell AWS, take partner commissions or sell software, so none of that sits behind my advice.
Client work is confidential, so you won’t find client names or case studies here. Mission FinOps isn’t affiliated with or endorsed by AWS.
Get in touch
Email hello@missionfinops.com with a few sentences: what changed, what you’ve tried, and which decision is stuck.
Prefer to talk? Book a 20-minute call.
Please don’t send billing exports, logs or credentials in the first email. I’ll reply first and we’ll agree how to share data.