Contract DevOps and platform engineering for teams running on AWS.

Services

Infrastructure as Code

Bring hand-built AWS resources under Terraform, write reusable modules, and set up state, versioning and review so changes are predictable.

CI/CD pipelines

GitHub Actions or GitLab pipelines for infrastructure and applications, with testing, approvals and safe rollouts built in.

AWS landing zones

Multi-account structure with Control Tower, SCPs, networking and guardrails. Account vending so new environments are minutes, not weeks.

Platform engineering

Self-service tooling, standard modules and clear patterns so developers can ship without raising tickets.

Observability & incident readiness

Prometheus, Grafana and Datadog set up with alerts people will act on, plus runbooks and dashboards for the questions auditors ask.

Security & compliance

Hardening, vulnerability management and remediation against PCI DSS, ISO 27001, Cyber Essentials and DISA STIG.

Cost optimisation

Find and remove waste: right-sizing, decommissioning, and reporting so spend stays visible.

Resilience & DR

Backup and disaster recovery strategy, then testing it, so recovery is something you've done rather than something you hope works.

Migration

Moving legacy and on-premises workloads into AWS, and retiring the old estate afterwards.

Selected work

Running business-critical platforms

Application support for the tooling engineering teams depend on: GitLab, Sonatype Nexus, SonarQube, Squid, Postfix, Chef, Red Hat Satellite and Red Hat IdM. Second and third line support for a large enterprise cloud environment, working with ITSM teams to meet incident SLAs, including out of hours.

Patching and baseline security

Patch management across a large estate of virtual machines, with Chef cookbooks applying security baselines and the right agents and configuration to every VM, so the estate stays consistent and compliant.

Identity, access and privileged access

Owned the joiner/mover/leaver process for cloud users and helped define requirements for a SaaS tool (Saviynt) to automate it. Worked across teams to deliver a PAM solution for AWS, routing privileged roles through Delinea Secret Server, finding flaws, testing and getting it ready for go-live.

Risk, certificates and change control

Tracked TLS certificates and renewed them well ahead of expiry, keeping product teams informed and following change management throughout. Raised issues for the organisation's risk registers and helped remediate the ones in my area.

Resilience and business continuity

Led annual business continuity attestations for critical shared services, planning the order of recovery and leaving engineers with detailed, reusable runbooks. Managed problem records so they were updated regularly and closed in good time.

Observability and cost

Improved Datadog coverage across the cloud environment while keeping ingestion to the logs and metrics that matter, so monitoring gets better without the bill growing with it.

Automation

Wrote scripts and pipelines that automate or semi-automate manual workflows, speeding up routine processes and freeing engineers for higher-value work.

Cloud strategy

Helped shape the organisation's cloud strategy: flagging where things weren't right and proposing practical ways to fix them.

How we can work together

Contract

Embedded in your team as a platform or DevOps engineer, remote or hybrid, working through your backlog and your processes.

Fixed-scope project

A clearly defined outcome, such as a landing zone, a Terraform migration or a pipeline rebuild, delivered with documentation and handover.

Review & advisory

A short engagement looking at your AWS estate, pipelines or security posture, ending in a prioritised list of what to do and why.

Stack

AWS

VPC, EC2, ECS, Lambda, S3, RDS, IAM, Organizations, Control Tower, Config, Security Hub, CloudTrail, Backup, WAF & Shield, OpenSearch, Bedrock

Tooling

Terraform, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Ansible, Docker, Python, Bash, Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, Cloudflare

Security

PCI DSS, ISO 27001, Cyber Essentials, DISA STIG, SELinux, Qualys

About

I'm Conor Lewis, an SC-cleared platform engineer based in Derbyshire, working with clients across the UK. I have over a decade of experience designing, supporting and optimising Linux-based environments, including CentOS, Ubuntu and Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and I've delivered resilient, scalable solutions for public and private sector organisations.

My background is in systems administration, automation and scripting, with a focus on operational efficiency, lower running costs and practical technical improvement. More recently that has meant building Infrastructure as Code modules and improving CI/CD pipelines so cloud infrastructure deploys consistently and repeatably. The result for engineering teams is more reliable platforms, faster provisioning and simpler delivery.

I previously supported the Financial Conduct Authority through Cognizant as part of the Cloud Infrastructure Operations team, managing a large enterprise cloud estate. That covered incident management, patching, observability, on-call and shared platform services. It means I'm comfortable with audits, change control and security requirements, and with running things as well as building them.

I aim to leave teams with modules, pipelines and documentation they can run without me.

AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate · ITIL v4 Foundation · SC cleared

Contact

Tell me what you're running and what's causing problems. I'll reply with how I could help.

hello@clcloudservices.co.uk