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- AWS at Scale #Main 1: An Introduction.
AWS at Scale #Main 1: An Introduction.
Welcome to AWS at Scale - a platform dedicated to demystifying the realities of building and operating large-scale AWS environments in enterprise contexts.
Lee Wynne
March 01, 2024
Covered in this first ever edition of AWS at Scale
Reading time: 3 Minutes 🚀
Introduction
My name is Lee Wynne. Throughout my career, I’ve had the privilege of architecting cloud solutions at scale for some of the world’s largest and most complex organisations. Today, I serve as a Senior/Principal Cloud Architect (currently at Informa PLC) a global FTSE 100 company with over £3 billion in annual revenue and 11,000+ employees. Informa operates at the forefront of the global knowledge economy.
I work closely with our Senior Leadership Team, Senior Stakeholders, InfoSec teams, Networks, DevOps, Developers, FinOps, Observability, Enterprise & Solutions Architects to provide leadership that ensures that what's built on our Cloud platforms aligns with compliance, governance, principles, standards, policies and general guidelines whilst maintaining the velocity of change and innovation that Informa demands.
I'm proud to be part of an excellent team that supports the people behind London Tech Week, Fan Expo, MegaCon, Monaco Yacht Show, Black Hat, Game Developers Conference, The AI Summit, MedTech and hundreds of other huge global events that you’ve probably attended at some point in your career.
We’re all in on AWS Cloud, we have no data centres, for an enterprise that’s north of £3b in annual revenue, that’s some achievement! 🌟
Why AWS at Scale?
I launched this initiative to share the hard-won strategies, technical patterns, and career insights that enable architects, developers, and cloud leaders to thrive in enterprise AWS environments. AWS at Scale will serve as both a knowledge base and a blueprint, helping you:
✅ Navigate enterprise cloud transformation.
✅ Build cloud platforms that scale with confidence.
✅ Align with governance, compliance, and security standards.
✅ Enable frictionless developer and DevOps experiences.
✅ Drive continuous innovation through automation and reusable design.
What You Can Expect
Each post will distill complex AWS topics into practical, bite-sized insights—backed by real-world experience and visualised through clear diagrams and reference architectures. Topics will include:
☑️ Designing core landing zones and scalable control planes.
☑️ Establishing platform-as-a-service blueprints for consistent developer onboarding.
☑️ Implementing enterprise-grade CI/CD, IaC modules, and observability pipelines.
☑️ Operationalising FinOps, tagging taxonomies, and privileged access models.
☑️ Building cloud-native patterns for microservices, serverless, and event-driven architecture.
☑️ Driving stakeholder engagement and cultural transformation.
The Main Story Line
To keep things focused and digestible, I’ve split the content into two distinct streams: Main and Branch.
The Main posts form the core narrative covering foundational principles, architectural strategies, and enterprise-scale AWS best practices. These are the pillars of building and running AWS at scale.
The Branch posts, on the other hand, are designed as tactical explorations, think of them as side quests that expand on key concepts, provide practical how-to guides, or share niche insights from real-world scenarios. Whether you’re following the storyline or exploring the edges, both paths are built to sharpen your AWS expertise.
Here’s the main story line I intend to cover (some of which have already been published). Please ensure that you subscribe here to receive a newsletter post as each one of the main topics are published.
✅ What is AWS at Scale? (the post you’re reading)
✅ Making the right career choices.
✅ Mechanisms for change.
✅ Building and engaging with your stakeholders.
✅ Defining and aligning your standard.
✅ Aligning standards with enterprise level principles.
✅ Primary cloud vs other clouds (how to manage strategy and adoption without over stretched your resources).
✅ Defining and building a communication strategy.
✅ A Cloud platform provider / consumer model.
→ Reusable Infrastructure as Code modules.
→ Reusable CI/CD pipelines.
→ Reusable design patterns and reference architectures.
✅ Core foundations, landing zone & control plane.
→ An SDLC mindset
→ At core landing zone level
→ → Dev LZConsumer LZs
→ At AWS account level
→ → Dev, Test & Prod
→ → Standalone
→ → Sandbox
→ Segregation
→ → At account level (dev, stage production)
→ → Throughout the core network
→ → → East west inspection VPCs
→ → → Centralised egress inspection VPCs
→ → Removing VPC peering
✅ Privileged access models (PAM) for:
→ Request & approval for time bound AWS console/cli based access.
→ Identifying roles for:
→ → Break fix
→ → View Only
→ → Read Only
→ → Session Manager
→ → Secrets Manager
→ Building a multi stage approval MFA based process for root IAM account access.
→ Removing local IAM accounts
✅ Reference VPC architecture for automated vending, standardisation and reusability.
→ Industrialised for provider management at scale.
→ Fit for the future of microservices and serverless
✅ Tiering (and ultimately designing for it).
→ Uptime, RTO & RPO objectives.
✅ A mandatory tagging taxonomy from sources of truth.
→ Flowing mandatory tags down to resources
→ Providing recommended resource level tagging
→ Tagging storage resources with the appropriate data classification
✅ FinOps
→ Discovering and setting estimated AWS account level budgets during the engagement process.
→ Automated AWS account spend dashboards and identifying trends.
→ Visualising and approving budget changes when commits are made to the infrastructure as code pipeline / repo.
→ Automated enrolment of AWS accounts into an AWS Private Marketplace.
→ Implementing an AWS Private Marketplace request and approval process.
→ Ensuring all non prod compute runs on spot.
→ Ensuring all non prod storage is tiered as required.
✅ Identifying early adopters.
✅ Build the advocates.
✅ Creating an architectural engagement process.
→ Data gathering for.
→ → Requirements.
→ → → Non function.
→ → → Functional.
→ → → Vending
→ Outputs
→ → Early stakeholders comms.
→ → Schematics.
→ → Enablement guides.
→ Why it’s important to be
→ → Opinionated.
→ → Decisive.
→ → Confident.
→ How to reduce the amount of snowflakes by building cattle and not pets.
→ → Provisioning over configuration
→ → EC2 by exception.
→ → Implement cattle, not pets.
✅ Changing behaviour and ways of working.
→ Stop perceiving AWS as a data centre.
→ Building an ‘everything as code’ approach.
→ Driving changes through the CI/CD pipeline (and not the console).
✅ Tips on getting hired as an AWS professional within a large corporate enterprise.
→ Interview techniques.
→ Dos and Don’ts.
→ What the hiring manager is looking for.
→ Tools and preparation.
What Does AWS at Scale Even Mean?
Or more specifically, what does AWS at Scale mean to me?
To me, AWS at Scale means delivering consistent governance, compliance, FinOps practices, and unified yet consistent developer/DevOps experience, all enabled through automation, standardisation, and vending. It’s about providing these capabilities through a provider to consumer service/model to teams and workload owners via architectural engagement models and ITSM processes. These guardrails cover critical elements that builders may overlook because they fall outside their immediate domain of responsibility.
In practice, your builders don’t need to see the full enterprise architecture, they just need a reliable, scalable platform that lets them build with speed and confidence.
AWS at Scale is about bootstrapping that capability. When an AWS account or VPC is provisioned, it should come fully equipped, with governance controls, CI/CD pipelines, and reusable Infrastructure as Code modules - so teams can start building within minutes. This approach enables consistency, reduces time to value, and ensures every product team benefits from a secure, scalable, and opinionated DevOps experience.
Connecting With Me
Here’s my professional bio if you want to connect and learn more about what I do within my role - my primary focus being AWS and cloud (at scale).
Wrapping it Up
It goes without saying AWS is one of the most valuable and future-proof skill sets in the industry today. It opens doors to exciting challenges, career-defining opportunities, and the kind of flexibility and lifestyle benefits that are hard to match.
In large enterprises, working with AWS often means global exposure, attending world-class conferences like AWS re:Invent, and collaborating with talented, like-minded professionals across disciplines and time zones. It’s an environment where you can continuously grow, share knowledge, and contribute to something much larger than yourself.
It can also lift you out of poverty.
The pace of innovation in AWS is relentless, there’s always something new to learn. If you have a curious, technically driven mindset, this space will never feel stagnant. The skills you develop are highly transferable and in demand across virtually every industry, because today, every business is consuming AWS—either directly or indirectly.
Repeat after me…
If you’re already on your AWS journey, it’s time to level up.
Many thanks for reading and i’ll be posting again soo, Lee ✌️
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