Free Cloud Analysis for Cost, Security & Performance

Most engineering leaders we talk to have the same feeling about their cloud: they know roughly what it costs and roughly how it performs, but they don't have a clear picture of the gaps. Security posture, configuration drift, idle spend, architectural risk. The details live in various tools, dashboards, and people's heads, and nobody has pulled it together into a single honest assessment with a full cloud analysis.

That's what our free cloud review does. We review your environment across cost, security, performance, and architecture, and deliver a written report with specific findings and a prioritized list of what to address. No sales process attached to it. The goal is to give you an accurate picture of where things stand so you can make better decisions about what to fix, what to invest in, and what to leave alone.

Who it's for

The analysis works best for organizations where cloud is a material part of the operating budget, or where reliability has real business consequences.

Companies running AWS or Azure that have been growing quickly and haven't had time to audit what they've built. Teams that spun up infrastructure fast during a growth phase, made reasonable decisions under pressure, and haven't gone back to revisit them since. That pattern produces environments that work well enough day to day but carry risks and inefficiencies that compound over time.

Regulated businesses in healthcare, fintech, or SaaS with enterprise customers that need to understand their HIPAA, PCI, SOC 2, or HITRUST posture before an audit surfaces the gaps. Compliance requirements don't wait for a convenient time, and the cost of finding problems during an audit is much higher than finding them during a voluntary review.

Teams where cloud ownership is distributed across multiple engineers or squads and nobody has a unified view of the full environment. This is extremely common in organizations that have grown by adding teams rather than centralizing infrastructure ownership. Each team understands their corner well, but the cross-cutting concerns (security posture, cost attribution, resilience) fall through the gaps.

CTOs and CFOs who have a sense that the cloud bill should be lower but can't point to specific causes. Or who have been told the architecture is sound but haven't had an independent review of that claim. It's useful to have a second opinion from people who aren't invested in defending the decisions that were made.

If you've gone through a period of fast growth, a merger or acquisition, or a significant architecture change in the last year or two, the analysis tends to surface more findings than expected.

What we look at

We evaluate the environment across five areas.

Cost and efficiency. Idle and oversized resources, spend anomalies, recurring waste patterns, and opportunities for right-sizing or architectural changes that would reduce ongoing costs. This often turns up more than teams expect, particularly in environments with multiple teams deploying independently, or ones that haven't been reviewed since a significant scaling event. For a detailed breakdown of where hidden AWS costs typically live, see our guide to common AWS cost drivers.

Security and governance. Publicly exposed resources, insecure defaults, IAM roles and permission boundaries, logging and monitoring coverage, and audit readiness for regulated workloads. We assess not just whether controls exist, but whether they're configured in a way that would actually catch or prevent a problem. An S3 bucket policy that looks correct can still leave data exposed if a dependent resource is misconfigured.

Availability and resilience. How your architecture holds up against realistic failure scenarios: a single AZ going down, a dependency becoming unavailable, a deployment going wrong, a backup that needs to be restored under pressure. We look at whether your documented recovery time and recovery point objectives are achievable given what's actually deployed, rather than what the architecture diagram suggests should be possible.

Performance and scalability. Responsiveness under expected and peak load, bottlenecks in compute, storage, and networking, and whether your current architecture can scale without significant rework. We pay particular attention to components that look fine at current traffic levels but have characteristics that will cause problems at 2x or 5x load.

Cloud maturity and best practices. How your deployment workflows, automation, and observability stack compare to current AWS and Azure recommended patterns. This isn't about hitting a checklist. It's about identifying specific gaps that are creating operational risk or slowing your team down, alongside the quick wins that would make the most immediate difference. Our cloud operations work regularly starts with findings from this section.

The output is a written findings report covering what we found, what the risk or cost implications are, and a prioritized action list. It's written to be useful for both engineers who need to act on it and business stakeholders who need to understand it.

How it works

We start with a 30-minute call to understand your environment, your current concerns, and any specific areas you want us to focus on. If there's something keeping you up at night, we make sure to look there first.

From there, you grant us limited read-only access to collect metadata about your infrastructure configuration, resource inventory, IAM policies, and cost data. We're not accessing customer data, application data, or anything beyond what's needed to evaluate the configuration and architecture of your environment.

Our analysts review the environment and typically deliver the findings report within a week. We follow up with an optional walkthrough with a senior cloud architect where we talk through the findings, answer questions, and discuss the prioritization. Some teams want to go deep on one area; others want a broad overview. We adapt to what's useful.

Why we offer it at no cost

The honest answer is that most teams who go through this analysis find enough to work on that some of them engage us to help address it. That makes the analysis worth offering without a fee from our side.

But there's genuinely no obligation attached. If you read the report and handle everything internally, that's a good outcome. We'd rather give you an accurate picture and let you decide what to do with it than structure the engagement to create dependency. Teams that come back to us for implementation work do so because the analysis was useful and they want to keep working with people who gave them a straight answer, not because we've made it difficult to go another direction.

Absolute Ops brings together cloud engineering, DevOps and platform engineering, security and compliance, and cost optimization. We work across AWS and Azure and have run this analysis across a wide range of environments, from early-stage startups with a handful of services to regulated enterprises running complex multi-account architectures. The findings are based on what's actually in the environment, assessed against current best practices, not a generic scoring rubric.

Get started

If you want a clear picture of your cloud environment, request your free analysis here. We'll schedule a discovery call and take it from there.