AWS Consultant for Cost, Security, and Terraform
Independent AWS consulting for remote teams in the US, UK, Canada, Europe, and Australia, from an engineer who runs 10+ production AWS environments today.
I'm Manip Poudel, a DevOps Team Lead with 5+ years on AWS and an AWS Certified Security – Specialty (valid through September 2029). I review your account, write down what is wasting money or exposing you, and then fix it in Terraform with your team reviewing every change.
20–40%
lower AWS bills per account, zero downtime
~70%
less manual provisioning with Terraform modules
~60%
lower CI spend with reusable GitHub Actions
10+
production AWS environments run today
When teams bring in an AWS consultant
- The AWS bill grows every month and nobody has time to find out why.
- A customer security questionnaire or SOC 2 prep is asking questions about IAM, encryption, and logging you cannot answer yet.
- Infrastructure was built by hand in the console and every new environment takes days.
- You run EKS or ECS in production but no one owns upgrades, autoscaling, or alerting.
AWS consulting services
AWS cost optimization review
A pass through Cost Explorer, tagging, and the resources behind each line item: oversized instances, gp2 volumes, idle non-production environments, and NAT gateway traffic that a VPC endpoint would carry for less. Every fix lands as a Terraform default so the bill does not drift back. On one anonymized mid-size client this took the bill from roughly $3,800 to roughly $2,300 a month.
How I cut AWS bills 20–40% across 10+ accounts →AWS security and IAM review
IAM least-privilege review against actual CloudTrail usage, account and SCP structure, KMS and secrets handling, GuardDuty, Security Hub, and AWS Config coverage, plus removal of long-lived access keys through GitHub OIDC federation. In an organisation-wide rollout this cut IAM permission surface by about 60%. You get prioritized findings, not a 200-page scanner export.
Read the DevSecOps transformation case study →Terraform for AWS
Reusable Terraform modules for networking, compute, databases, IAM baselines, and observability, with S3/DynamoDB remote state and a plan-review-apply workflow in CI. Standing up a new environment becomes a reviewed pull request instead of days in the console.
Read the Terraform multi-environment case study →Amazon EKS and GitOps
EKS clusters run through ArgoCD, Helm, autoscaling, and Prometheus/Grafana monitoring, with runbooks your team can follow. Deploys become a Git merge, and rollbacks become a revert.
How I run GitOps on production EKS →CI/CD on AWS
Versioned, reusable GitHub Actions workflows shared across repositories, self-hosted EC2 runners with persistent caches, and OIDC-based deploys to AWS. In my current role this cut typical builds from 12 to 7 minutes and CI spend by about 60%.
Read the reusable GitHub Actions case study →How an engagement works
- Free discovery call. We go through your accounts, workloads, and the problem you want solved.
- Written proposal. Scope, deliverables, and pricing in writing, with no obligation.
- Fixed-scope review. Read-only access, a prioritized findings report, and the fixes implemented in Terraform.
- Ongoing support if it fits. Some teams keep me on as a fractional DevOps engineer for monthly cost reviews, security work, and incident response.
Looking for broader DevOps help, such as CI/CD outside AWS or GCP infrastructure? See all DevOps consulting services.
Frequently Asked Questions
What does an AWS consultant do?
An AWS consultant reviews and improves how your workloads run on AWS: architecture, security posture, cost, and how infrastructure gets changed. In my engagements that means a written findings report followed by hands-on fixes, codified in Terraform so they stay fixed.
Are you an AWS Partner?
No. I am an independent engineer, not an AWS Partner organization. I hold the AWS Certified Security – Specialty, valid through September 23, 2029, and you can verify it on Credly.
How much can an AWS cost review save?
It depends on how the account has been run. Across 10+ client accounts I reduced AWS bills by 20–40% per account with zero downtime, mostly through right-sizing, gp2-to-gp3 migration, non-production scheduling, and NAT gateway and VPC endpoint fixes. I will not promise a number before I have seen your Cost Explorer data.
Do you need full admin access to our AWS account?
No. Reviews start with read-only access, such as the AWS-managed ReadOnlyAccess and Billing view policies on a dedicated role you can revoke at any time. Write access is scoped to the work we agree on and preferably flows through Terraform pull requests you review.
Do you work with teams in the US, UK, Canada, and Australia?
Yes, fully remote. I am based in Nepal (UTC+5:45), which overlaps European mornings, US evenings, and the APAC working day. My current team is in Tokyo, so async-first work with agreed overlap windows is how I already work every day.
How does an engagement start?
Send a short note through the contact form describing your setup and the problem. We have a free discovery call, I send a written proposal with scope and pricing, and most engagements begin with a fixed-scope review before any ongoing work.
Get a second pair of eyes on your AWS account
Tell me what you run on AWS and what is bothering you: the bill, a security questionnaire, or slow deploys. If you can share last month's bill or a Terraform repo, I read it before we talk.
Book a free discovery call