Representative engineering work from Atlas Stack Group.

Situation

Cloud platform operating in a FedRAMP High regulated environment across multiple AWS accounts.

Challenge

• • Infrastructure and deployment workflows needed to meet strict FedRAMP High controls across many cloud accounts.
• • Existing environments lacked consistent automation patterns and traceable change management.

Approach

• • Defined a reference architecture for secure multi-account AWS environments aligned to FedRAMP High expectations.

Solution

• • Defined a reference architecture for secure multi-account AWS environments aligned to FedRAMP High expectations.
• • Implemented Terraform-based infrastructure automation with clear account boundaries, encryption, and audit trails.

Outcome

• • Improved confidence in compliance readiness for cloud infrastructure.
• • Reduced operational risk and manual effort required to deploy infrastructure in regulated environments.

Technologies

AWS • Terraform • IAM • KMS • CloudTrail • CI/CD

Situation

High-growth cloud platform operating in a FedRAMP High regulated environment across 20+ AWS accounts.

Challenge

• • Configuration management needed to be standardized across 24 cloud accounts.
• • Initial proposals favored an open-source AWX deployment, but there were concerns about compliance authorization, lifecycle stability, and enterprise support.

Approach

• • Conducted an architecture evaluation comparing AWX and Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform with a focus on compliance inheritance, integration with CI/CD, and long-term lifecycle support.

Solution

• • Conducted an architecture evaluation comparing AWX and Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform with a focus on compliance inheritance, integration with CI/CD, and long-term lifecycle support.
• • Designed an automation architecture using a centralized Ansible Automation Platform control plane with dedicated execution nodes per AWS account and least-privilege IAM boundaries.
• • Integrated the control plane with existing CI/CD pipelines so infrastructure changes flowed through versioned playbooks and auditable deployment workflows.

Outcome

• • Leadership adopted the recommended architecture, simplifying the path to FedRAMP High authorization for configuration management.
• • Reduced estimated time-to-production for the automation platform from more than a year to several months.
• • Established a scalable pattern for automation that could be extended to additional cloud environments without re-architecting.

Technologies

AWS • Terraform • Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform • AWX (evaluated) • CI/CD pipelines • FedRAMP High environment

Situation

Federal cloud environment supporting regulated workloads across 20+ AWS accounts.

Challenge

• • Infrastructure deployments were inconsistent across accounts and Terraform state management was fragmented.
• • Cross-account access patterns introduced operational and security risks.

Approach

• • Designed and implemented a Terraform-based platform architecture with per-account state isolation.

Solution

• • Designed and implemented a Terraform-based platform architecture with per-account state isolation.
• • Established S3 remote backends, DynamoDB state locking, and KMS encryption with account-scoped modules.

Outcome

• • Enabled safe parallel infrastructure deployments with reduced blast radius.
• • Improved compliance traceability and platform scalability across all accounts.

Technologies

AWS • Terraform • DynamoDB • KMS • S3

Situation

Enterprise DevOps platform serving multiple regulated AWS environments.

Challenge

• • CI/CD pipelines relied on static AWS access keys stored inside automation systems.
• • Credential management created security risk, audit burden, and policy violations.

Approach

• • Implemented OIDC-based authentication between GitHub Actions and AWS IAM.

Solution

• • Implemented OIDC-based authentication between GitHub Actions and AWS IAM.
• • Replaced long-lived access keys with short-lived, dynamically issued credentials in deployment pipelines.

Outcome

• • Eliminated static cloud credentials from CI/CD workflows.
• • Reduced credential rotation overhead and improved compliance posture.

Technologies

GitHub Actions • AWS IAM • OIDC • Terraform • CI/CD

Situation

Large AWS environment running distributed services across multiple Kubernetes clusters.

Challenge

• • Monitoring and logging were fragmented across teams and services.
• • Incident response was slowed by lack of centralized metrics, logs, and traces.

Approach

• • Built a centralized observability stack using Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, and Tempo.

Solution

• • Built a centralized observability stack using Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, and Tempo.
• • Implemented Prometheus federation, centralized log ingestion, and distributed tracing integration.

Outcome

• • Delivered centralized visibility across environments and clusters.
• • Improved incident detection and troubleshooting speed for engineering teams.

Technologies

Prometheus • Grafana • Loki • Tempo • Kubernetes • AWS

Situation

B2B SaaS (scaling from a single team to multiple product squads)

Challenge

• • Build and deploy times were inconsistent and heavily manual
• • Limited traceability from change to production, making incidents harder to diagnose
• • Security checks were ad-hoc and often bypassed under delivery pressure

Approach

• • Standardized pipelines with reusable workflows and environment promotion rules

Solution

• • Standardized pipelines with reusable workflows and environment promotion rules
• • Introduced artifact versioning, release metadata, and deployment approvals where needed
• • Added policy-driven checks for secrets, dependencies, and infrastructure changes

Outcome

• • Reduced time from merge to production with predictable, repeatable releases
• • Improved incident response with clear release provenance
• • Made security checks part of the default path, not an afterthought

Technologies

GitHub Actions • Terraform • AWS (ECS/ECR, IAM) • OIDC workload identity • Snyk or equivalent scanning • OpenTelemetry

Situation

Regulated organization (auditable controls, strict change management)

Challenge

• • Inconsistent AWS account structure and network segmentation across environments
• • Manual changes created drift and made evidence collection painful
• • Security posture improvements were reactive and difficult to prioritize

Approach

• • Defined multi-account strategy, network baselines, and service boundaries

Solution

• • Defined multi-account strategy, network baselines, and service boundaries
• • Built Terraform modules for common building blocks (VPC, logging, IAM patterns)
• • Implemented posture guardrails and a remediation backlog tied to controls

Outcome

• • Reduced drift through standardized infrastructure workflows
• • Faster audit evidence collection with centralized logging and configuration history
• • Clear controls mapping and a practical path to improved security posture

Technologies

AWS Organizations • Control Tower (or equivalent landing zone) • Terraform • CloudTrail • AWS Config • KMS • Security Hub

Situation

Cloud-native product team (high availability expectations)

Challenge

• • Alert fatigue: too many low-signal notifications and unclear ownership
• • Limited end-to-end visibility across services, making latency regressions hard to root cause
• • No reliability targets tied to customer impact

Approach

• • Implemented high-signal telemetry and standardized service dashboards

Solution

• • Implemented high-signal telemetry and standardized service dashboards
• • Defined SLOs and alerting based on error budgets and user impact
• • Improved incident response workflows and runbooks; automated common remediation steps

Outcome

• • Reduced noise and improved time-to-diagnosis during incidents
• • Clear reliability targets and tradeoffs during roadmap planning
• • Improved platform stability with fewer recurring incidents

Technologies

OpenTelemetry • Prometheus • Grafana • Loki (or equivalent log stack) • AWS CloudWatch • PagerDuty (or equivalent)