Our Services

Our main goal is ensuring your applications are fast, secure, and reliable - while optimizing operational processes and keeping your AWS cost under control. Whether you’re launching a new application, migrating to AWS, or looking to optimize your existing environment, we’re here to help.

Depending on your project needs, we offer: outcome-focused, fixed-cost projects tailored to your specific requirements, or flexible implementations based on billable hours. Either way, you get hands-on technical expertise, always with your business goals in mind.

To address your unique challenges, we’ve developed targeted service packages, including:

AWS Architecture Review

Optimize your AWS Architecture for peak performance. For your existing AWS environment, whether it's in production or advanced development, we offer a comprehensive Architecture Review. Our process incorporates our internal checklist, AWS Well-Architected Framework best practices, and our proven "Ready for Prime Time" methodology.

What You'll Get: The certainty that your applications are production-ready and built to scale. We'll pinpoint and address any weaknesses in Performance, Resiliency, Cost Management, Operations, and Security. In addition, our reviews identify opportunities for significant AWS cost reductions, typically of 25% or more.

AWS Service Assessment

Choose the right AWS services from the start. Migrating to AWS or building something new? We help you select the ideal AWS services (such as EC2, ECS, S3, DynamoDB, Lambda, Kinesis, SageMaker, etc.) early in the architecture design stage, before building any applications.

In this package we evaluate specific AWS Services (i.e. EC2, ECS, S3, DynamoDB, Kinesis, SageMaker, etc.) early in the Architecture Design stage, before clients build their applications. This is a good fit for customers that are migrating to AWS or that are building new applications in AWS.

What You'll Get: Ensure your applications will run optimally and grow as expected, by choosing the right AWS components. We'll also help you spot potential risks and opportunities early in key areas like performance, resiliency, operations, automation, and security. Plus, we’ll provide an early estimate of your AWS costs.

More information about our approach can be found here.

AWS Proof of Concept (PoC)

Minimize risk in your AWS design. Our PoC package allows you to implement an AWS architecture with minimal - or stubbed out - application components. This helps you identify critical interactions between AWS components, pinpoint potential risks, and gather key metrics for accurate AWS cost projections at scale. This package includes the execution of load tests at the expected production volume.

We have a strong track record of delivering PoCs across a wide array of AWS services, including AWS IoT, Kinesis, Lambda, DynamoDB, EMR, Redshift, Athena, CodePipeline, Elastic Container Service, RDS, SageMaker, EC2 (using high volume scenarios with Auto Scaling), and many more.

We’ll deliver a CloudFormation or Terraform template, ready to serve as the foundation for your development, test, and production environments. Plus, we'll provide code snippets to accelerate your initial development activities.

What You'll Get: You’ll be able to make informed technical decisions early and sidestep costly commitments in areas like programming languages, design patterns, data access patterns, automation, security, and authentication solutions, etc

AWS Technical Interviews

Hire Top AWS Talent with Certainty. During my time at AWS, I built teams of software engineers inside Amazon. Having conducted hundreds of technical interviews, I offer expert assessment of candidates for key AWS roles such as DevOps Engineers, AWS Solutions Architects, Cloud Engineers and other technical positions. This service includes dedicated interview time, a comprehensive report, and a clear hire/no-hire recommendation. More details on my approach can be found in this article.

What You'll Get: Hire talented individuals who will drive technical excellence within your organization.

AWS Load Tests

Ensure your AWS applications can handle any expected traffic. Preparing for a launch, a big marketing push, or expecting a surge in users? Our AWS load tests simulate real-world traffic against existing applications running on AWS infrastructure in your pre-production environment. It is also very valuable as a mechanism to identify and test performance optimizations for live Production environments. We handle the planning, development, execution, and result analysis of load tests, even providing AWS cost projections. Plus, you get to keep the reusable test scripts.

What You'll Get: Catch performance bottlenecks early, before they impact your users and potentially cause system outages. We'll also help you evaluate your AWS cost at scale and identify potential cost-related risks early. This is also a powerful way to find and validate performance improvements in your live environment.

Data Analytics Benchmarks and Optimizations

Fine-Tune your Data Analytics infrastructure for efficiency. To help you maximize your Data Analytics implementations on AWS, we offer detailed benchmarking and optimization services for platforms like EMR (including Spark, Hadoop, Trino, Flink, Hive, etc.), AWS Glue, Redshift, and Athena. Our approach involves running Data Analytics Benchmarks - both custom and industry standards such as TPC-H or TPD-DS - tailored to your unique application requirements, considering factors like storage configurations, file formats, dataset sizes, Data Lakes, and Data Warehouses. You'll receive a comprehensive performance report, and we'll work through multiple iterations to fine-tune your datasets and cloud configurations. We can also integrate these benchmarks with your SageMaker Machine Learning deployments.

What You'll Get: You'll gain clear insights into the optimal cloud-based Data Analytics platform and configuration for your specific data and business requirements. Given that Data Analytics implementations can result in high AWS cost, this package also calculates AWS cost in advance to help you avoid unexpected expenses

AWS Cost Optimizations

Slash Your AWS Bills. Take control of your AWS costs with our expert optimization services and proven Cost Optimization methodology. We delve into reserved purchase evaluations (EC2, RDS, Redshift, and more), and Savings Plans (EC2, ECS, Lambda, and SageMaker), identifying idle and over-provisioned resources, and ensuring your usage is covered by existing Reserved and Savings Plans commitments.

Our comprehensive approach targets cost savings across your entire AWS environment. Cost savings opportunities are evaluated and implemented based on the right balance of Performance, Resiliency and Operations that you’ll require, according to your business needs.

What You'll Get: We evaluate and implement cost-saving measures tailored to your required balance of performance, resilience, and operational needs. In most cases, reduce AWS cost by at least 25% and in some cases by as much as 50%.

AWS DevOps Automation Setup

Improve and reduce manual intervention for DevOps tasks. We evaluate your current operational processes and implement full end-to-end DevOps automation workflows, including code deployment tasks using integrations with commonly used Git repositories (e.g. GitLab, Bitbucket, GitHub), CI/CD pipelines and automated tests. We also ensure your AWS components have the right alarms and notifications configured, to ensure your team gets notifications as soon as anomalies are detected in your CloudWatch metrics.

What You'll Get: Optimal DevOps processes and the ability to react and correct operational issues quickly to improve your applications’ resiliency and performance.

AWS Infrastructure Setup

From blueprint to Production, seamlessly. We design, setup, test and deploy a fully operational AWS architecture. You’ll receive a CloudFormation stack with all AWS components ready, load tested and their applications deployed in it and with implemented DevOps CI/CD automated workflows. This package also includes monitoring, alarming and documented operational procedures. We follow our internal best-practices checklist and processes documented in Concurrency Labs’ Ready for Prime Time methodology, including AWS cost estimations.

This package supports new application deployments, existing workload migrations, and AWS environment expansions or optimizations. We have extensive experience working with a very wide range of AWS services, such as: EC2, Identity and Access Management (IAM), S3, Auto Scaling, Elastic Load Balancing, CloudFront, Lambda, API Gateway, DynamoDB, ElastiCache, Relational Database Service (RDS), Elastic Container Service (ECS), Elastic Map Reduce (EMR), Redshift, Athena, SageMaker, and many others.

What You’ll Get: a load-tested, reliable AWS infrastructure operating in Production, which can handle your current and future growth with predictable AWS costs.

AWS Architecture as a Service

Ongoing expertise for a resilient AWS infrastructure. We offer a monthly subscription service that provides you with continuous, personalized AWS guidance, practical hands-on support, and regular infrastructure reviews. Our core focus is ensuring your AWS environment consistently adheres to best practices in Performance, Resiliency, Cost, Security, and Operational Excellence.

All our services, including this one, are delivered using our "Ready for Prime Time" Methodology, refined through years of successful AWS projects for clients worldwide.

What You’ll Get: Keep your Production applications running reliably and providing a stable foundation for your business growth.

Does this sound like something your business could benefit from?

Do you want to get peace of mind, knowing you’ve chosen the right AWS components that will fuel your business growth? I’ll be happy to walk you through more details. Just click on the button below to schedule a 30-minute call. I’m here to help!

Ernesto Marquez
Concurrency Labs Ltd.
Owner and Project Director
Ex-Amazon (AWS) and AWS Certified Solutions Architect

Our 4-stage “Ready for Prime Time” methodology

You're expecting growth in your business, and you know that moving from a few customers to many thousands (or even millions) brings significant changes. You know that running slow applications that crash will kill your business growth. You also know that running applications that cost more than they’re worth will eat your profit. Inefficiencies will be amplified. That’s why fast, reliable and cost-effective applications are the engine of your company’s growth.

Fortunately, you've chosen AWS, the most powerful cloud platform out there.

But while AWS can give you major advantages, it can also be complicated. Having AWS expertise is essential, but it’s not enough. You need a process that simplifies AWS. That’s why we created the “Ready for Prime Time” methodology, which is designed specifically to help you grow applications on Amazon Web Services.

These steps apply whether you’re building, migrating or already operating applications on AWS.

1. BUSINESS FIRST

Outcome: Know WHAT needs to be done - set goals.

2. PREPARE

Outcome: Know HOW we are going to achieve goals.

3. EXECUTE

Outcome: See results in Production.

4. SUSTAIN AND IMPROVE

Outcome: Prepare the next iterations - set the bar HIGHER

The “Ready for Prime Time” methodology finds the right balance of Performance, Price and Availability for your business. Security is not a trade-off.

Our whole methodology is based on your business priorities. For your applications to grow, they must have the right mix of Performance, Price and Availability. At the same time, your applications must always follow AWS security best practices.

Here are some examples:

Performance: how fast your systems respond to customer transactions, how many transactions per second will your systems handle, how will your systems react to spikes in traffic, how will your systems sustain usage growth over time.

Availability: how will your systems react to internal or external failure, how quickly will your systems recover from internal or external failure, how prepared is your team to handle operational emergencies, which processes do you have in place to reduce the possibility of failure, how do you communicate failure internally and to your customers.

Price: how do you reduce existing AWS cost, how do you make AWS cost predictable and traceable, how much money does it make sense to invest in Performance and Availability.

Security: ensure you’re following AWS’ shared responsibility model, implement security, access and auditing best practices. Security is not negotiable and it is independent of all other optimization variables.

Performance and Availability cost money

In an ideal world, all your applications can handle 1 million transactions per second with sub-millisecond response times, are 100% fault-tolerant and don’t cost a lot of money. But that’s not the world we live in. Performance and Availability cost money - the right balance varies by how critical an application is to your business and how it impacts your customers.

There is a point where the Return on Investment for Performance and Availability starts to fade. But there’s also a point where low cost puts your customer experience and business revenue at risk.

Does this sound like something your business could benefit from?

Do you want to get peace of mind, knowing you’ve chosen the right AWS components that will fuel your business growth? I’ll be happy to walk you through more details. Just click on the button below to schedule a 30-minute call. I’m here to help!

Ernesto Marquez
Concurrency Labs Ltd.
Owner and Project Director
Ex-Amazon (AWS) and AWS Certified Solutions Architect

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the main pain this is going to solve for me?

If you’re in the middle of significant business growth and your systems are not ready for it, your company is going to suffer. We make sure that your AWS-based applications don’t put your growth plans at risk.

How do I know if this is for me?

Your business is experiencing or is expected to go through considerable growth. You want to ensure your AWS-based applications don’t become an obstacle for that growth. For example, you need your AWS-based applications to handle 10x the amount of transactions they handle today, without any degradation to the customer experience or without AWS cost getting out of control.

When should I implement this methodology?

As early as possible, even when your applications still don’t get a lot of usage. When an application grows, so do its inefficiencies. And some inefficiencies are structural, meaning they require some radical changes to correct them. You want to avoid this situation as much as possible, therefore you should think about how you're going to grow your applications from day-1.

OK, but how do I make sure I don’t over-engineer my applications?

We are well aware of the risk of over-thinking or over-engineering systems too early. Making such a mistake results in investing time and money on features that are not really necessary on day-1. That’s why we identify and quantify your business flows and growth goals at the beginning. This gives us clarity over which activities are critical for your business growth. Doing 12-week iterations also helps us focus on things that are really critical for your business growth.

What type of organizations is this for?

We work with organizations and leaders who can drive change quickly. Ideally, you’re a company with 5-50 employees and you can make decisions without going through multiple layers of approval. You have the power to hire service providers (like me), hire engineers (if needed), update internal processes, approve AWS expenditure, etc., quickly.

What if I’m a bigger company?

As long as you lead a relatively small organization within that company and you can effectively drive change, this can be for you. The key element is that you can implement processes rapidly within your team. This methodology is not designed to transform a large enterprise.

What if I am building a new application, or migrating to AWS?

Our methodology still applies to you. As long as you’re using AWS, this methodology will ensure your applications can handle any expected growth. You can actually gain more and have a cleaner implementation if you apply the principles of our methodology early in your AWS adoption journey.

How is this different from the AWS Well-Architected Framework?

While the “AWS Well Architected” framework is the best repository of AWS best practices, it is generic in nature and it doesn’t tell you when and how to implement them. Concurrency Labs’ “Ready for Prime Time” methodology is consistent with the “AWS Well Architected” framework. We take you one step further by focusing on how and when to implement AWS best practices to enable growth of smaller companies using AWS.

How do you deliver it?

This methodology consists of a documented series of steps. When we work together, we go through an index that has all the steps in the methodology. There are multiple document templates and checklists - some are completed by you and others are completed by Concurrency Labs. There is a shared project plan, which is updated collaboratively. We use collaboration tools, such as Basecamp, Slack, e-mail and video conferencing. I’m also open to traveling to your location to get started and meet your team in person.

What type of technical work is performed as part of this methodology?

The following are some examples of technical deliverables and tasks: writing automation scripts, assessing AWS components, setting up and updating AWS components (i.e. EC2 instances, VPCs, CloudWatch Dashboards, tags, etc.), creating CloudFormation templates, running and analyzing load tests.

Do you do application tuning?

No. In most cases we can achieve significant optimizations by using the right AWS components. However, there might be cases where fine-tuning your application code could help. If this is the case, your development team should be in a better position to implement optimizations at the code level. Our methodology covers setting up the right monitoring tools and test procedures, which will uncover issues that need application tuning and it will make it possible to validate when a code optimization is successful or not.

Who does the actual technical work?

Concurrency Labs can implement all the technical work, or your team can do it. Who does the technical work will vary according to your team skills, capacity and priorities. The amount of technical work will also vary based on your current situation and what is actually needed. We work with you to prepare a proposal that clearly states the type and amount of work as well as accountability.

Do you have a money-back guarantee?

Yes. If at the end of the “Business First” stage you’re not satisfied with the steps in our methodology, or we can’t arrive at optimization goals that meet your business goals, or there’s any other reason that makes you not want to continue - then we refund 100% of any fees incurred, as per our proposal.

Do I get to keep document templates and process?

Yes. You get to keep the templates, reference material and documents that our methodology consists of. You can only use them for internal projects, though. In other words, you’re not allowed to sell them.

What happens after you’re done with an optimization project?

We work based on optimization iterations and goals. Like any service provider, we will eventually move on. But we’re not your typical consultant or freelancer. A BIG difference is that at the end you will have a process with valuable templates and documented steps. Your team will know how to implement future iterations and will have the processes and documents to do it. If you want Concurrency Labs to help you with multiple iterations, we will be happy to do so. But when you’re ready to do them on your own, we will leave behind the necessary tools and knowledge. We want you to be successful in the long term.

I want to know more - how do I get in touch?

Just click on the button below to schedule a 30-minute call!

You can also send me a message, I answer 100% of my e-mails...

Ernesto Marquez
Concurrency Labs Ltd.
Owner and Project Director
Ex-Amazon (AWS) and AWS Certified Solutions Architect