Your AWS bill is doing cardio

Technical advisory is independent senior judgement bought by the engagement rather than by the headcount. In practice it means an architecture review, an assessment of cloud spend and integration risk, and a written recommendation that says what to change, in what order, and what each change is worth. It differs from staff augmentation, where you buy hands, and from a code audit, which examines one codebase rather than the decisions around it.

Almost always one of four things: environments nobody switched off, instances sized for a peak that happened once, storage with no lifecycle policy, or data moving between regions and availability zones because of where a service was placed rather than because anybody wanted it there. None of these show up as a feature, which is why nobody on the product side notices until finance does.

Enough to be worth looking, and nobody can tell you the figure before they look — any number quoted before the invoices are read is a marketing number. What we can say is where it comes from: idle and oversized resources first, then commitment and reserved-capacity planning, then architectural changes that take longer and save more. We tell you the size of the prize after the first week, not before.

Mapping which system owns which piece of data, agreeing what happens when two of them disagree, designing the contract between them, building it with retries and failure handling, and putting monitoring on the connection itself. The building is rarely the hard part. Deciding which system is allowed to be right usually is, and that is a business decision wearing technical clothing.

No. We hold no partner tiers and take no commission or referral fee from any cloud provider or software vendor. We are paid by you, for the engagement, and nothing about our income changes if your bill goes down. You should ask every other firm on your shortlist the same question.

Yes, and it is the usual arrangement. Most of our advisory work sits next to an in-house team that knows the product far better than we do and simply needs a second senior opinion that has no internal politics attached. We write for your engineers, not around them.

We answer that one with arithmetic rather than instinct: licence cost over three years against build cost plus the maintenance you will carry afterwards, which is the figure most build-versus-buy cases quietly leave out. Buying wins more often than agencies like to admit, and we will say so when it does.