Production depends on it.
Customers, revenue or core processes run through this environment. Every rebuild therefore has to happen in steps that can be taken back individually.
All services
Freelance AWS Architect
A freelance AWS architect for the environment you already run.
If your AWS environment has grown, carries production and still nobody can say why the bill looks the way it does or what a region outage would mean, you do not need a slide-deck architecture. I work in existing environments: measure, clean up, rebuild, secure, all described in Terraform and in steps that do not stop operations.
AWS SA – Professional–83% costs, documentedTerraformzero-downtime delivery
What I get hired for
- An architecture assessment of a grown environment: risks, costs, order of work
- Cutting AWS costs, based on the Cost and Usage Report instead of gut feeling
- Migration to AWS: data centre or another cloud, with a cost model upfront
- Resilience: setting RTO and RPO and aligning the architecture to them
- Infrastructure as code: moving hand-managed environments into Terraform
- Baseline security: IAM with least privilege, network separation, audit logging
Scope & working together
As part of your team or delivering independently, at a fixed price or by time spent to suit the project.
Remote from Germany. Straight with me, no agency in between.
The starting point
The environment has grown. So has the architecture, only invisibly.
Most AWS environments I see were never designed. They accumulated: one account, then two, instances from a migration weekend, security groups from back then, a NAT gateway quietly eating money for years. Everything works, and that is exactly the problem – it works until the bill stands out, an audit asks questions or a region wobbles. Then it turns out nobody holds the environment as a whole in their head.
I have worked in exactly such environments for years, as an AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional, plus Security – Specialty and Terraform Associate, all publicly verifiable via Credly. More important than the certificates are the documented results: I brought two grown accounts from 15,000 to 2,500 euros a month, with the same feature set. I modernized and migrated the revenue reporting of an AdTech platform with nine-figure turnover to AWS while it kept running, from zero to one hundred percent infrastructure as code. And the attribution service from my case studies runs in two regions, because a region outage there is meant to be an event, not an incident.
The difference to a classic cloud consultant: I do not leave a recommendation behind, I implement. First comes measurement, in the Cost and Usage Report, in the incident history, in the architecture itself. Then the rebuild happens in steps, each deployable on its own, each with a way back, while production keeps running. At the end the environment is described in Terraform, and your team can change it without asking me.
The honest limit belongs here too: I am not a managed service provider and do not want to operate your environment permanently. The goal of every engagement is that your team gets on without me. If you are looking for someone to guard the console indefinitely, I am not the right person, and I will say so in the first call.
Situations I get called into- The AWS bill rises or fluctuates, and nobody can reliably say why.
- The environment grew through the console; there is no Terraform and nobody who knows all of it.
- An audit or a major customer asks about resilience, IAM and encryption.
- The data centre or hosting contract is expiring, and AWS is the target.
- An incident showed that recovery steps and responsibilities are written down nowhere.
- The team ships features; experience for architecture and infrastructure questions is missing.
Who this is for
For decision-makers whose AWS environment has become business-critical.
This page is for CTOs, engineering leads and platform owners whose environment is productive and has grown over years: a SaaS, a platform or internal core systems. This is not about a first experiment in the cloud, but about responsibility for what already runs there.
There are open questions with a price tag.
Cost, resilience, an audit or an upcoming migration: the question is concrete, and a wrong answer costs measurable money.
Your team should own the environment afterwards.
No permanent consultant, no operations contract. Infrastructure as code, documented decisions and a handover after which your team can make changes itself.
What I do
What I work on in AWS environments
01
An assessment instead of a slide-deck architecture
Taking stock of the environment as it really is: accounts, networks, data flows, cost structure, recovery. The result is a written assessment with risks, effort and an order of work, sorted by what costs money or sleep first.
02
Cutting costs without cutting capability
FinOps based on the Cost and Usage Report: clean up and measure first, then architecture and capacity, commitments last. In my longest documented case, 15,000 euros a month became 2,500, with the same feature set – the path there is written up as a field report on the blog.
03
Migration to AWS
From the data centre or another cloud, with a cost model before the decision instead of a surprise after it. Landing zone, network architecture and baseline security are built along the way, and the move runs in steps that do not stop operations.
04
Resilience with numbers
Not "highly available" as an adjective, but RTO and RPO as a decision: what may an outage cost, how quickly must what be back, and which architecture follows. Multi-AZ is often enough, multi-region sometimes, and I show you the arithmetic instead of selling the bigger option.
05
Infrastructure as code
Hand-managed environments are moved into Terraform, step by step and without a rebuild: import, describe, reconcile. Afterwards every change is a review instead of a console click, and a second environment is a plan run instead of a weekend.
06
Baseline security
Not a separate security consultancy, but the foundations every business-critical environment needs: IAM with least privilege, separated accounts, encryption, audit logging, secrets out of the code. As an AWS Certified Security – Specialty this is part of the rebuild, not an add-on offer.
Specific cases
Reduce AWS costsWhen the bill is the most pressing question: FinOps based on the Cost and Usage Report, with the AWS cost analysis at a fixed price of 2,400 euros as the entry point. Its own service page.
AWS migrationWhen the move is due: from the data centre or another cloud to AWS, with a cost model before the decision and a move in steps. Its own service page.
Tell me about your AWS environment.
30 minutes, directly with me. You describe the situation, I tell you honestly whether I am the right person – and if not, I say so in the same call.
How it runs
How an engagement starts
Four steps, and after the second you have an assessment you can act on even without me. No step commits you to the next.
STEP 01
First call, 30 minutes
You describe environment and trigger: cost, an audit, a migration or an incident. I tell you whether I am the right person and what I would look at first.
STEP 02
Assessment with numbers
Read access is enough. I read the Cost and Usage Report, the architecture and the incident history; the outcome is a written assessment with risks, savings and an order of work.
STEP 03
Rebuild in steps
One measure, one rollout, one result, then the next. Everything described in Terraform, every step individually reversible, production keeps running.
STEP 04
Handover to your team
Runbooks, documented decisions and infrastructure as code your team can change itself. No operations contract, no dependency on me.
The outcome
What is different afterwards
The bill is explainable
Every major line item has a name, an owner and a reason. Whether it shrinks or stays becomes a decision, not fate.
The environment lives in code
Terraform describes what runs. Changes go through review, a second environment is reproducible, and the console click from back then is no longer a source of truth.
An outage is a rehearsed case
RTO and RPO are set, recovery is written down and rehearsed. What a region outage means is established before it happens.
Your team owns the environment
Access, code and knowledge stay with you. You can do the next rebuild yourself, with me, or with somebody else – that is the point.
Technologies I use
What I work with
Compute
- ECS Fargate
- EC2
- Lambda
- Auto Scaling
Data
- RDS & Aurora
- DynamoDB
- S3 & storage classes
- ElastiCache / Valkey
Network
- VPC
- CloudFront
- Route 53
- Load Balancer
Cost
- Cost and Usage Report
- Athena
- Budgets
- Savings Plans
Security
- IAM
- Organizations
- KMS
- Secrets Manager
Infrastructure as code
- Terraform
- CloudFormation import
- GitHub Actions
- GitLab CI
Observability
- CloudWatch
- Prometheus
- Grafana
- Alarms with an owner
Method
- Spec-driven development
- Claude Code
- Small steps
- Runbooks
From practice
Case Study
AWS costs from €15,000 to €2,500 a month
Two grown AWS accounts for production and staging, systematically cleaned up and optimized: tidy up and measure first, then architecture and capacity, commitments last. Same applications, same users, same availability.
Read the case study–83%AWS costs
€12,500less per month
0cuts to the feature set
Also from real projects
Case Study
AWS migration in a nine-figure turnover environment
The revenue reporting of a global AdTech platform, modernized and migrated to AWS while it kept running: from zero to one hundred percent infrastructure as code, 90% fewer incidents, and the old path only switched off once both sides had delivered identical numbers for weeks.
Read the case studyArticle
FinOps on AWS: finding the hidden architecture costs
Where four- and five-figure amounts quietly disappear in grown AWS setups – NAT gateways, egress, forgotten retention – and how to get them back without changing a single line of code.
Read the articleArticle
The handover day
How an engagement ends without leaving a dependency behind: the one test that says anything, the inventory of personal accounts, the swapped roles in the final weeks, and a deadline instead of an open door.
Read the article
Who you are talking to
Directly with me as a freelancer. No agency in between.
I am Tim Rutte. More than 20 years in software development. Today I build business-critical systems on AWS. You talk to the person who touches your code, from the first call to the handover.
- 20+years in software development
- 50+successful projects
- 2003working remotely since then
Working together
Working with your team or delivering independently.
You do not need to bring a particular setup. I adapt the engagement to how your company works and how much responsibility you want to hand over.
01Together
I work as part of your team.
If knowledge and responsibilities already sit with you, I join wherever additional experience is needed. Inside your workflows, in direct contact, without creating a parallel track.
- Integration into your sprints, reviews and technical decisions
- Pairing and knowledge transfer throughout delivery
- Code, documentation and operations remain fully with your team
02Independent
I take ownership of delivery.
If you lack time or capacity internally, I take a clearly scoped piece of work from technical clarification through to production. You set the objective and constraints; I take care of the path there.
- One point of contact from clarification through to delivery
- Regular, clear progress updates without day-to-day supervision
- A proper handover with documentation and a walkthrough
Whichever model you choose, you always know what is being built, which decisions are pending and what happens next. Billing follows the project and the model you prefer: clearly bounded work at a fixed price, longer or more open-ended work by time spent.
Continuity
Your system remains yours.
Independent delivery does not create dependency on me. Everything required to develop and operate the result stays in your environment from day one and remains ready for handover throughout the engagement.
Access stays with you.
Code, cloud accounts, pipelines and secrets live in your systems. Operations never depend on a personal account or credentials that only I control.
Knowledge does not stay in my head.
Architecture decisions, operating procedures and known risks are documented where your team will find them and kept current as the work progresses.
Someone else can take over.
Reproducible environments, automated deployments and regular handovers allow your team or another provider to continue without starting again.
The goal is not for you to depend on me permanently. The goal is for you to remain free to decide who develops the system next.
Common questions
Common questions for a freelance AWS architect
What does a freelance AWS architect cost?
At a fixed price or by time spent, to suit the project and the model you prefer; I name the range in the first call, once scope and timeframe are clear. The most common entry point has a fixed price: the AWS cost analysis for 2,400 euros, results within ten working days, credited on a follow-up engagement. It also answers the question of whether further work is worth it at all.
Which AWS certifications do you hold?
AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional, AWS Certified Security – Specialty, AWS Certified Generative AI Developer – Professional and AWS Certified Developer – Associate, plus HashiCorp Certified: Terraform Associate. All five are publicly verifiable via my Credly profile. More important than the list are the results in the case studies, because a certificate proves knowledge, not a project.
Our environment grew through the console. Is that a problem?
It is the normal case. Almost every grown environment starts with clicks, and nobody needs to be embarrassed about it. The way out is incremental: what exists is imported into Terraform and described, not torn down and rebuilt. In the migration from my case studies this went from zero to one hundred percent infrastructure as code, while the system kept running.
Do you also take over ongoing operations?
No, not as the normal case, and that is deliberate. I am not a managed service provider; the goal of every engagement is that your team can operate and change the environment itself afterwards. For that I leave behind infrastructure as code, runbooks and documented decisions. For transition periods, support can be agreed, but with an end date.
Do we need multi-region?
Usually not, and the answer should be arithmetic, not a reflex. Multi-AZ covers the common failures; multi-region pays off when a region outage costs you more than the permanent complexity and the duplicated infrastructure. What actually matters when a region goes down, I have worked through in a dedicated article, including the costs nobody plans for.
Can you cut our AWS costs without making anything slower?
In most grown environments, yes, because the first big block consists of unused work: data without consumers, metrics without readers, oversized capacity, forgotten retention. In my documented case, around 7,000 euros a month disappeared through cleaning up alone, before any architecture change. Commitments such as Savings Plans deliberately come last, on the cleaned-up baseline.
Do you only advise, or do you implement as well?
Both, and the larger part is implementation. The assessment at the start is a working document, not a final report: afterwards I rebuild the measures myself, in steps, with Terraform and review. In my experience, advice without implementation leads to documents nobody reads.
Do you work with our existing team?
Yes, and that is the preferred mode. If your team is in place, I join where architecture and AWS experience is missing: in reviews, in decisions, in pairing. If nobody has time internally, I take a well-bounded piece of work independently. In both cases, accounts, code and knowledge stay with you.
Other services
What else I help with.
AWS migration
From your own data centre or another cloud onto AWS, with a cost model before the move and a rollback path for every step.
Learn moreReducing AWS costs
I find where your AWS budget leaks away, and cut it measurably without giving up performance or availability.
Learn moreBackend development
Backends for SaaS and platforms that hold under real load: Go and PHP 8, event-driven, with tenant isolation and recovery designed in.
Learn more