AWS Architecture Review
What your account actually looks like, what breaks first, and what it is costing you to keep it that way.
From $299 2–4 days
AWS Documentation & Handover Pack
What you actually have, written down, so it survives whoever built it leaving.
Price and scope
From $299
Typically $299–$749, fixed in writing before anything starts.
What moves it up
- Nothing written down at all, so every fact has to be derived from the account
- More than about twenty resources, or more than one account
- A specific handover deadline — somebody leaving, or an acquirer asking
What actually goes wrong
The person who built it holds the system in their head, and everyone knows this is a risk in the way everyone knows they should exercise. What makes it acute is that the missing knowledge is never the architecture — a competent engineer can read that off the account in a day. It is the undocumented decisions: why that instance is oversized, which of two similarly named buckets is live, what breaks if the old security group is deleted, and the manual step somebody performs every quarter that exists nowhere except in their calendar.
How I find it
An inventory generated from the account, then reconciled against what anyone believes is trueEvery scheduled task found — cron, EventBridge, Lambda schedules and anything in a person's calendarA resource-by-resource question: what breaks if this is deleted, asked until somebody knowsThe recovery path walked through end to end rather than described
What you get
- Architecture diagrams generated from the account, so they match what exists rather than what was planned
- A resource inventory with owner, purpose and what depends on it
- Runbooks for the things that are done by hand, including the quarterly one nobody mentioned
- An access map — who and what can reach production, and how access is granted and removed
- A recovery procedure, in the order things come back, tested rather than asserted
Questions
Is this not something my own team should write?
They should, and they have not, which is why you are reading this. The reason is rarely laziness — it is that the person who knows cannot see what is worth writing down, because all of it is obvious to them. An outsider asking naive questions is the thing that actually produces documentation.
How do I stop it going stale immediately?
By generating what can be generated. Diagrams and inventories come from the account, so they can be regenerated rather than maintained. Only the decisions and the runbooks are prose, and those change far more slowly than the resources do.
Can you do this if the person who built it has already left?
Yes, and it costs more, because everything that would have been a question becomes an investigation. If they are still around and willing to talk for an hour, book this before they go rather than after.
What format do I get it in?
Markdown and SVG in a repository you own, not a PDF and not a wiki page on my account. It should live beside your code and be editable by whoever comes next, without asking me for the source.
If this is not quite it
AWS Security Posture Review
What is exposed, who can reach it, and what an attacker would find first. Nothing is changed.
From $299 2–4 days
Want this done?
Tell me what you are running and I will come back with a fixed price and a date. If it turns out you do not need this, I will say that instead.
Prefer to talk? Book a free call ↗ · Or hire me on Upwork ↗ · Typical reply within one business day.
Before you enquire
When I answer
Sunday to Thursday, 09:00–18:00 EET. Outside that I will still look, but I will not promise a time.
No 24/7 desk, and I will not pretend otherwise
One person, one time zone. If round-the-clock cover is what you need, you need a team, and I will say so rather than sell you a plan that cannot deliver it.
Your AWS bill stays yours
You pay Amazon directly and you keep control of the account. Nothing here resells your infrastructure or sits between you and your own billing.
A price that starts with "from" is a starting price
Every service page lists exactly what pushes a quote above it, before you ask. You get a fixed number in writing before any work begins.