Eugene O.

AWS Engineer | AWS Solution Architect | DevOps | Keycloak professional

Over the past 18 years in IT, and 12 of those running my own practice, I've worked as an AWS Engineer and an AWS Solution Architect on the same projects more often than not, holding both AWS certifications (Professional and Associate) plus the AWS Security Specialty. Clients started calling me an AWS Solution Architect because I was the one sketching the diagram before anyone touched a resource, and they kept calling me an AWS Engineer because I was also the one who ended up building it. Across 50-plus projects for 20-plus clients, that mix is still what people hire me for: someone who can be the AWS Solution Architect and the AWS Engineer on the same engagement instead of two separate people who barely talk. - Core AWS: Lambda, API Gateway, DynamoDB, S3, CloudFront, MediaConvert, Glue - Infrastructure as code: CloudFormation, Terraform - Security and identity: IAM, Cognito, GuardDuty, Security Hub - Data and analytics: EMR, Kinesis, SageMaker, Athena None of that architecture means much if it can't ship reliably, which is the part DevOps covers. I build the CI/CD pipeline alongside the infrastructure on almost every project, because splitting DevOps from architecture usually just means both suffer. I bring the same DevOps habits to every engagement: automate anything repeatable, monitor anything fragile, and make deployments boring instead of a weekly gamble. Teams usually reach out for DevOps help specifically once releases start feeling risky, or once nobody's quite sure why the pipeline breaks every third deploy. The DevOps side of things doesn't really change between serverless and containerized stacks, only the tools do. - CI/CD: CodePipeline, CodeBuild, CodeDeploy - Containers: Docker, Kubernetes, Helm - IaC for deployment consistency: CloudFormation, Terraform Identity tends to be the part teams get wrong quietly, for years, which is why I also work as a Keycloak professional alongside everything above. As a Keycloak professional, I've replaced tools like Okta with custom setups that cost a fraction as much and actually fit the rest of the AWS architecture instead of bolting on next to it. Companies usually bring in a Keycloak professional once logins have gotten messy across several applications that grew up independently, and untangling that is a problem I genuinely like solving. Every Keycloak professional engagement I take starts the same way, with an audit of what's already there before I touch a single realm. - Cut identity management costs by 90% moving a client off a proprietary identity provider - Delivered 41% in cloud cost savings for a finance company - Built a full video platform in under 600 hours - Launched an AI assistant in 3 months at a fraction of typical cost - Migrated a production environment to a new AWS region with zero downtime If your team needs an AWS Engineer who can also own the architecture decisions, or an AWS Solution Architect who sticks around past the diagram and into the build, that's usually the role I end up playing. I've been brought on as the AWS Engineer on projects that already had an architect, and I've been brought on as the AWS Solution Architect on projects that just needed direction before anyone touched AWS at all; either way, the same person ends up doing both by the second week. The same goes for DevOps and identity: I'd rather set up a deployment pipeline once, correctly, than keep firefighting the same release every week, and if Keycloak or single sign-on is anywhere in the picture, having a Keycloak professional involved early saves a lot of rework later. Most engagements that start with me as an AWS Engineer or an AWS Solution Architect end up needing DevOps support too, plus a Keycloak professional layered in wherever identity is part of the scope. That's the actual range on any given week: AWS Engineer work, AWS Solution Architect work, DevOps work, and Keycloak professional work, whichever the project needs most at that stage.