Senior AWS engineering and AI integration — from the architect, not an account manager.
20 years across media & entertainment, SaaS, and enterprise. AWS Solutions Architect Pro. You get Nick — scoping the work, doing the work, and answering the phone when something breaks.
AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional · 20 Years Across M&E, SaaS & Enterprise
AWS spend recovered for a global ed-tech platform
students on a SaaS platform scaled live — zero downtime
average monthly AWS savings across cost optimization engagements
infrastructure experience across M&E, SaaS, and enterprise
What We Build
AWS Architecture & Cost Optimization
We design, migrate, and right-size AWS environments — multi-account strategy, high-availability architecture, FinOps, and infrastructure built to scale with your product. From greenfield builds to legacy modernization, including deep specialization in media streaming, live event infrastructure, and SaaS platforms.
We don't guess at what to fix. We audit your environment, identify the exact waste, and give you a prioritized list of what to act on — before any engagement begins.
Typical outcome: 20–40% reduction in monthly AWS spend. Infrastructure your team can operate without a dedicated cloud hire.
AI & GenAI Integration
Production-ready AI systems — not demos. RAG pipelines, document intelligence, image classification, and custom model integrations built on AWS Bedrock, SageMaker, and OpenAI. We scope the system, architect the data flows, build the integration, and hand it off with documentation your team can actually use.
If you've been burned by AI projects that looked impressive in a sandbox and fell apart in production, this is how you do it differently.
Typical outcome: Working AI in your product or internal toolchain — scoped, shipped, and documented within weeks, not quarters.
Platform Engineering & DevOps
Everything-as-code for product teams that can't afford ops downtime. CI/CD pipelines, Terraform and CloudFormation IaC, containerized workloads on EKS or ECS, and deployment automation built around your release cadence — not a generic template.
We build the platform, document every decision, and make sure your engineers can operate it the day we walk away.
Typical outcome: Faster deploys, lower ops burden, and a platform your team can maintain without a dedicated infrastructure hire.
The Work
$180K/year recovered — without touching the product
A global ed-tech platform with a runaway AWS bill called us in. The ask: figure out why costs had tripled in 18 months without any meaningful traffic growth. In under 30 days, we audited 3 years of usage, identified over-provisioned compute, idle reservations, and untouched legacy workloads. We rightsized 40% of the fleet, migrated eligible workloads to Reserved Instances, and implemented auto-scaling policies — all while a live course cohort ran uninterrupted. No downtime, no rollbacks, no service tickets from users.
200,000 live viewers. 7 days to build it.
A media company needed to scale their live streaming infrastructure for a flagship event — and had one week. We designed the elastic ingest and distribution architecture from scratch, wrote the Terraform, provisioned the environment, and built the go-live runbook. Peak concurrent viewers exceeded projections by 40%. Not a single dropped stream, not a single on-call page during the broadcast. Post-event, we left them with a repeatable IaC template for every live event going forward.
14 million students. One migration window. Zero downtime.
A fast-growing SaaS platform needed to migrate off aging infrastructure without interrupting live traffic or damaging user trust. There was no room for a multi-night outage. We designed the full AWS architecture, wrote the cutover playbook, and executed the migration across a single maintenance window — new stack live, traffic shifted, post-launch optimization complete within 72 hours. No incidents, no emergency pages, no angry emails from enterprise customers.
From prototype to production AI in 6 weeks
A SaaS company needed automated image classification at scale — but had no AI infrastructure, no ML team, and a hard customer deadline. The prototype had been built by a contractor and couldn't handle production load. We scoped the real system, designed the model integration and processing pipeline, rebuilt it properly, and shipped a production-ready solution. Fully documented. Fully owned by their team on day one of the handoff. They've processed over 2 million images on it since.
Eye Connect Digital: 21 security findings. Full AWS + GWS audit. Delivered in 48 hours.
Eye Connect Digital — a founder-led digital production company — had been running their business on AWS and Google Workspace for years without ever having a formal security review. The founder wanted an honest picture of their posture before something went wrong. No IT team. No prior audit. Just a cloud environment that worked, but nobody had ever looked at systematically.
We came in with read-only AWS credentials and Google Workspace admin access. Phase one: full account inventory and a Prowler scan across 40+ compliance frameworks — CIS Foundations, SOC 2, NIST 800-53, PCI DSS, HIPAA, GDPR, and MITRE ATT&CK. Phase two: Google Workspace admin console review — user accounts, external sharing settings, MFA enforcement, third-party app access. Phase three: a 21-finding prioritized report with remediation steps and effort estimates, plus a review call to walk through every item.
What we found: root account without MFA, IAM users with AdministratorAccess who didn't need it, S3 buckets without public access blocks configured, no CloudTrail logging, and Google Workspace external sharing open to anyone with a link. None of it was a crisis. All of it was fixable — and now the founder has a clear, prioritized list of what to address and in what order.
Time from credentials received to final delivery: under 48 hours.
References and full case details available on request.
How It Works
Discovery Call — 20 minutes
Tell us your stack, your pain, and what you're trying to solve. We'll tell you exactly what we'd look at, what we'd change, and what it's worth. No pitch deck. No prepared slides. No follow-up sequence designed to wear you down.
Findings & Scope
We audit your environment and deliver a prioritized findings report — what to fix, what it costs you today, and what you'll recover. If nothing's worth fixing, we'll tell you that too. You decide what to engage on; there's no pressure to proceed.
Delivery
Fixed scope. Clear milestones. We execute, document everything, and hand off cleanly. You get direct access to Nick after go-live — not a ticketing system, not a support tier, not a junior account manager reading from a runbook.
How People Engage Us
Fixed-Scope Project
A defined deliverable, a fixed price, a clear end date. Typical timeline is 4–12 weeks. Right for cost optimization audits, migrations, AI integrations, and platform builds where the scope is knowable upfront.
- Scoped in the findings phase
- Milestone-based delivery
- Full documentation and handoff
- 30-day post-launch support included
Architecture Retainer
Monthly hours for teams that need a senior architect on call — for design reviews, incident support, capacity planning, and ongoing optimization — without the overhead of a full-time hire.
- Set monthly hours, no burndown waste
- Priority response on incidents
- Quarterly architecture review
- Month-to-month, cancel anytime
Fractional CTO / Advisory
For companies that need senior technical leadership without a full-time hire. Vendor evaluation, hiring support, infrastructure roadmaps, and board-level technical presentations — on a part-time basis.
- Dedicated weekly time block
- Engineering team mentorship
- Vendor and toolchain guidance
- Technical due diligence support
Nick Allevato · AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional
20 years building infrastructure across the full stack — from bare metal to cloud-native to AI-assisted development. Not a generalist who learned cloud last year. Deep vertical experience in media & entertainment, where "good enough" doesn't survive a live broadcast and where the stakes for getting infrastructure wrong are very visible.
Client verticals: media & entertainment, ed-tech, SaaS, gaming, and enterprise engineering.
Core stack: AWS (EKS, ECS, RDS, Bedrock, SageMaker, CloudFormation), Terraform, Python, Docker, and the modern AI toolchain.
Independent practice since 2024. Not a staffing agency. Not a firm with a bench. When you engage Cold Smoke, you're working directly with Nick — from the initial call through the final handoff.
All client references available on request.
Common questions
What does the free architecture review actually include?
A 20-minute call where we look at your stack, your current spend, and your pain points. After the call, you get a short written findings summary — what we saw, what we'd prioritize, and a rough sense of what it's worth to fix. No invoice attached. No obligation to proceed. The idea is that you should know what you're buying before you buy it.
How is this different from hiring a big AWS consulting partner?
With a large firm, the senior architect who wins your business is rarely the one doing the work. You get analysts and junior consultants delivering against a methodology. With Cold Smoke, Nick scopes it, Nick builds it, and Nick is on the phone if something goes wrong at 2am. Smaller blast radius, faster decisions, no account management overhead. That's the trade-off — and for most teams in our wheelhouse, it's a clear win.
What size companies do you typically work with?
Primarily Series A–C SaaS companies, growth-stage media and entertainment businesses, and enterprise engineering teams that need to borrow a senior architect for a defined period. The sweet spot is 20–300 engineers — big enough to have real infrastructure complexity, small enough that a large firm is overkill.
Do you work with companies outside the US?
Yes. Most of the work is remote by nature — infrastructure doesn't care where you're sitting. We've worked with teams across North America and Europe. Time zone alignment matters more than location; we'll be upfront if something doesn't work logistically.
What if we just need a few hours of advice, not a full engagement?
That's what the architecture retainer is for. A small monthly block of hours gives you access to a senior architect without committing to a full project. A lot of clients start there, find a problem worth fixing, and convert to a project scope — but there's no pressure to do that.
Your AWS environment costs more than it should. Let's change that.
20-minute call. We look at your stack, tell you what we'd fix and what it's worth. You walk away with a prioritized findings list — whether you engage us or not. No pitch deck. No sales follow-up.