About Me, Cris Merritt
- Based in Philadelphia, USA
- Decades of experience
- Work for clients anywhere
As an independent cloud architect I can help your business:
- Plan your cloud strategy
- Design and build secure, scalable cloud infrastructure
- Find and fix security vulnerabilities
- Reduce cloud spending
I do this by addressing high value and high risk priorities first, planning and delivering concrete milestones on time, and supporting you going forward. I'm a dirty-hands technical guy but I'm also a veteran business founder, so I understand that your business runs on more than technology. Security intersects everything I do, from business continuity to change management, identity management, disaster recovery, monitoring and more.
Most of my clients are smaller or medium businesses, so I see many environments in transition. Often companies slide into consuming cloud resources in a not-so strategic way, starting with a little project, then another, etc., and it can get out of hand with spending too much, as well as security issues. Amazon/Azure/Google all encourage this sort of “infrastructure creep” - it serves the cloud providers very well, but a lot of businesses are overdue for a re-think of their cloud environments.
Usually, I first take a high-level view of where you stand, whether you are planning to transition services to a cloud platform or already there, and identify low-hanging fruit to save money, bolt down security, and automate common tasks. My initial consultation is FREE, and I strive to give you valuable insight with no obligation in our very first call. For the longer term, I design and document a roadmap to accommodate your business' growth, in which the underlying cloud infrastructure will not slow down or break down over time.
Cloud native technology with containers is a particular focus of my work. A lot of companies have a proliferation of ad hoc servers and could benefit from consolidating with containers, but lack the skills in-house. Containers and container orchestration, such as Kubernetes or ECS on AWS, are the basis for scalable and secure IT processes.
With me, there's never a sales person trying to up-sell you services and I don't delegate your work to a junior engineer. I work with you personally and take personal responsibility for everything I do. I document and check everything I do into your Git repo, so you have it forever, and you can always share it with your team or other service providers. I tend to get involved for a few weeks to a few months to realize a concrete deliverable, then stay involved on an as-needed basis for support. I can guarantee that my services will be less expensive than a big consultancy, and also less expensive than a full-time in-house cloud architect. I live in Philadelphia and work from my own office, while on-site time for kick-offs and checkpoints is possible. I time-track everything I do, and am normally available on a video call within an hour or two.
With decades of experience in security, infrastructure, development and operations, you can count on me to provide straight and pragmatic advice, solve high-priority problems promptly and deliver quality.
Top references from current satisfied customers are available.
Hands-on with Kubernetes, Docker, ECS, Python, Javascript, CloudFormation/CDK, Terraform Git, Linux, security, security and more security.
Recent project examples:
- Production infrastructure for a medical data webapp with AWS ECS
- Kubernetes infrastructure for a "smart laboratory" SaaS application
- Serverless architecture for an IOT application
- API integration with a major energy provider
- Kubernetes migration for a machine learning application
- AWS autoscaling infrastructure for a hotel management platform
- Technical architecture for clinical trials data for an international pharma company
- AWS cost analysis and 50% cost reduction for an energy trading platform
