CloudMatrix

The Challenge

CloudMatrix, a Series B fintech SaaS company with $18M in annual recurring revenue, was growing at 3x year-over-year. Their platform processes thousands of financial transactions daily for mid-market businesses, handling sensitive payment data and reconciliation workflows that demand both reliability and regulatory compliance.

The growth that made investors enthusiastic was quietly creating an operational crisis. Two platform engineers — the entirety of their infrastructure team — were responsible for an AWS environment that had grown from a handful of services into a sprawling estate of over 40 production workloads across ECS, RDS, ElastiCache, and Lambda. The strain was showing in every direction:

• No 24/7 coverage: With only two engineers, incidents outside business hours went unaddressed. A database connection pool exhaustion event at 2 AM on a Saturday went undetected for over three hours, causing transaction failures for customers in Asian time zones. This single incident triggered two customer escalations and put a $400K renewal at risk.
• AWS costs spiraling upward: The monthly AWS bill had climbed to $85K and was accelerating. Neither engineer had bandwidth for cost optimization, and reserved instance coverage had lapsed months ago. Development environments ran 24/7 because nobody had time to implement scheduling. Oversized RDS instances provisioned during a traffic scare six months prior were never right-sized.
• SOC2 audit approaching: CloudMatrix’s sales team had been promising enterprise prospects that SOC2 certification was imminent, but the reality was that almost none of the operational controls were in place. Access management was ad hoc, change management was undocumented, and audit logging had significant gaps. The certification timeline was becoming a sales blocker.
• Engineering velocity stalling: The two platform engineers spent an estimated 60% of their time on reactive operational work — responding to alerts, debugging performance issues, manually scaling services, and handling deployment problems. Product engineering was frequently blocked waiting for infrastructure changes.

CloudMatrix needed to hand off the operational burden entirely so their engineers could return to building the platform.

The Solution

Remangu assumed full managed operations responsibility for CloudMatrix’s AWS environment, implementing systematic improvements across monitoring, cost management, compliance, and operational processes.

Comprehensive Monitoring and Incident Management

We deployed a layered monitoring architecture using CloudWatch as the foundation, supplemented by custom metrics that reflected CloudMatrix’s specific business health indicators. Standard infrastructure metrics — CPU, memory, disk, network — were augmented with application-level signals including transaction processing latency, queue depths, payment gateway response times, and error rates by customer tier.

Alert routing was structured by severity. Critical alerts — those indicating customer-impacting issues — triggered immediate response from Remangu’s on-call rotation with a 15-minute acknowledgment SLA. Warning-level alerts were triaged during business hours and addressed proactively before they escalated. Informational alerts fed into weekly trend analysis reports.

AWS Config rules were deployed to detect infrastructure drift and non-compliant configurations automatically. Rules covered security group exposure, unencrypted storage volumes, public S3 bucket access, and IAM policy violations. Violations triggered automated remediation where safe to do so, and alerted for human review otherwise.

GuardDuty was enabled across all accounts with findings routed into the incident management workflow. This provided continuous threat detection for the environment, identifying and surfacing suspicious activity including unauthorized API calls, unusual network traffic patterns, and potential credential compromise.

Systematic Cost Optimization

The $85K monthly AWS bill was the first operational target. We conducted a detailed cost analysis using Cost Explorer and custom tagging to attribute spend to specific workloads, environments, and teams.

Reserved Instance and Savings Plan coverage was the highest-impact lever. Analysis of 90-day utilization patterns revealed stable baseline workloads suitable for 1-year no-upfront Savings Plans. Compute Savings Plans were purchased for the predictable ECS and Lambda workloads, immediately reducing the effective rate for those resources by 30-35%.

Right-sizing addressed the oversized instances that had accumulated during various scaling events. RDS instances were downsized based on actual peak utilization with appropriate headroom. ECS task definitions were updated with CPU and memory limits reflecting measured usage patterns rather than conservative guesses.

Environment scheduling was implemented for all non-production environments. Development and staging environments were automatically shut down outside business hours and on weekends, eliminating approximately $8K per month in waste that had been running unquestioned for over a year.

Storage lifecycle policies were applied to S3 buckets containing logs, backups, and historical transaction data. Infrequently accessed data was transitioned to S3 Intelligent-Tiering, and obsolete log data beyond retention requirements was expired automatically.

SOC2 Certification Program

Achieving SOC2 Type II certification required building operational controls from a limited foundation. We implemented the controls systematically over a 16-week program.

Access management was overhauled. Individual IAM users were replaced with federated access through the company’s identity provider. Role-based access controls were defined for each team, with permissions scoped to minimum required access. Privileged access required MFA and was logged through CloudTrail. Quarterly access reviews were established and automated.

Change management processes were formalized using Terraform as the single mechanism for infrastructure changes. All changes flowed through version-controlled pull requests with peer review, automated plan validation, and approval workflows. Emergency change procedures were documented with mandatory post-change review.

Security Hub was enabled with the AWS Foundational Security Best Practices standard and CIS AWS Foundations Benchmark. The initial assessment revealed 47 findings across the environment. We remediated all critical and high findings within the first month and established ongoing monitoring to maintain compliance posture.

Continuous compliance monitoring automated evidence collection for auditor requirements. Monthly compliance reports were generated automatically, documenting access reviews, change logs, incident response activities, and security finding resolution. This eliminated the manual evidence-gathering scramble that typically precedes audits.

Operational Runbooks and Knowledge Transfer

We documented runbooks for every recurring operational procedure and common incident type. These runbooks served dual purposes: they enabled consistent incident response by Remangu’s on-call team, and they created institutional knowledge that reduced CloudMatrix’s dependence on any single engineer’s tribal knowledge.

Monthly operational reviews with CloudMatrix’s engineering leadership covered infrastructure health trends, cost trajectory, security posture, and upcoming capacity needs. These reviews kept the engineering team informed without requiring them to be involved in day-to-day operations.

The Results

The managed operations engagement transformed CloudMatrix’s infrastructure from a liability into a stable, compliant, cost-efficient foundation for growth.

28% cost reduction was achieved within the first three months, bringing the monthly AWS bill from $85K down to $61K — a saving of approximately $24K per month or $288K annualized. The savings came from reserved instance coverage (40% of savings), right-sizing (30%), environment scheduling (20%), and storage optimization (10%). Costs have remained stable despite a 35% increase in transaction volume over the same period.

SOC2 Type II certification was achieved four months after engagement start, on the timeline sales had promised to prospects. The certification unlocked enterprise deals that had been stalled pending compliance attestation. In the quarter following certification, CloudMatrix closed three enterprise contracts collectively worth over $2M in annual contract value, each of which had explicitly required SOC2 compliance.

Zero unplanned downtime was maintained for eight consecutive months following the transition to managed operations. The 15-minute incident response SLA was met consistently, with mean time to acknowledge averaging 7 minutes. Fourteen potential incidents were detected and resolved proactively before they impacted customers, compared to the previous pattern of reactive firefighting after customer complaints.

40% increase in engineering velocity was measured by CloudMatrix’s engineering leadership based on sprint completion rates and feature delivery timelines. The two platform engineers transitioned from spending 60% of their time on reactive operations to spending 90% of their time on strategic platform improvements — building the deployment pipeline automation, service mesh implementation, and API platform features that had been deferred for over a year.