Overview
AWS solutions architect for a US Department of Education loan servicer from March 2023 to March 2025, working through AspirationalX. The body of work on this page is the migration itself: roughly 30 internal products moved out of a physical data center onto AWS, with the target environments expressed in Terraform rather than assembled by hand.
The constraint that shaped everything was the compliance envelope. Under FedRAMP and SOC 2, and under federal contracts, what a design is allowed to be is settled well before what it can do. Documentation, auditability, and procurement structure are design inputs, not paperwork produced after the fact — which is a large part of why infrastructure-as-code was the right mechanism and not just the current fashion. A Terraform module is a reviewable artifact: it shows an auditor what exists, it shows a change reviewer what is about to differ, and it makes the environment reproducible instead of remembered.
The client chose the harder, correct path: not lifting servers into the cloud as they stood, but expressing every target environment as reviewable code. That choice takes discipline from an organization, and this one — an established servicer with a 150-person engineering organization — carried it through.
Thirty products is enough scale that the hard problem stops being technical. A data center operating model has fixed capacity bought once a year, change requested through tickets, and infrastructure owned by a separate group. A cloud operating model has capacity as a per-decision variable, change through code review, and infrastructure decisions distributed to the teams making them. Moving workloads is a project. Moving the operating model is the actual migration, and it runs at the speed people learn, not the speed machines copy.
The trade-off that stays visible in this kind of work: the same code-and-review discipline that satisfies auditors also slows the first few months down. Teams used to filing a ticket and receiving a server have to learn a review loop before they get anything back. That cost is real and worth naming up front, because the payoff — reproducible environments and an audit trail that already exists when someone asks for it — arrives later than the cost does.
The second half of the engagement was the cost side of the same shift: see AWS Cloud Adoption FinOps Initiative.
Specific details are under NDA, and the client is described generically by agreement. The shape is the useful marker: enterprise cloud migration where the compliance envelope is strict, the organization is large, and the migration only succeeds if the people move with the workloads.