AWS Certified Solutions Architect Professional
Architecture-Grade AWS Engineering for Your Clients
Our engineers hold AWS Solutions Architect Professional certification. We design multi-account environments, Well-Architected structures, and DR strategies that hold up in production.
What the AWS Solutions Architect Professional Credential Means in Practice
Most AWS environments we inherit were built by people who learned the platform as they went. One VPC spanning every environment, root credentials used for CI/CD, IAM policies with wildcards that nobody can remove because something will break, and cost anomalies nobody noticed until the monthly invoice arrived. Engaging an AWS Certified Solutions Architect Professional means the architecture is designed before it is built, with the trade-offs made explicit rather than discovered in production.
The certification covers multi-account strategy, DR tier selection, migration pattern matching, and cost optimisation at a depth that goes well beyond foundational AWS use. When your client needs a landing zone built to AWS prescriptive guidance standards, or a DR architecture with a verified 15-minute RTO, that is the design level we provide through our NextEnvision engineering team. Our white-label delivery model means your agency presents this capability under your own brand.
AWS Architecture Services
Six architecture disciplines where Solutions Architect Professional-level design makes a measurable difference to your client outcomes.
Multi-Account Landing Zone Design
We design AWS Control Tower environments with account vending, Service Control Policies, and centralised logging from the start. A landing zone built correctly means your client can onboard 20 teams without rearchitecting the governance structure. Built incorrectly, it means SCP conflicts and manual remediation every time a new account is provisioned. This is a core deliverable of any AWS Certified Solutions Architect Professional engagement we run.
We handle both greenfield builds and the messy retrofit of single-account environments that outgrew their original design. Governance baselines include AWS Config rules, Security Hub standards, and GuardDuty enabled organisation-wide via AWS Control Tower delegated administration.
Well-Architected Framework Reviews
We run structured Well-Architected Reviews across all six pillars: Operational Excellence, Security, Reliability, Performance Efficiency, Cost Optimisation, and Sustainability. These reviews produce a prioritised finding list, not a slide deck. Each finding gets a severity rating and a specific remediation path. We track progress against that list and re-review on a defined cadence so your client can demonstrate continuous improvement to their own stakeholders.
Common findings we surface include missing multi-AZ RDS deployments, EC2 workloads that should be on Fargate, and overly permissive IAM roles created during initial prototyping and never tightened.
Disaster Recovery Architecture
DR tier selection is a cost-versus-recovery-speed trade-off that most clients do not make consciously. Backup-and-restore is cheap and recovers in hours. Pilot light keeps a minimal footprint warm for sub-30-minute recovery. Warm standby runs a reduced-capacity environment at all times. Multi-region active-active has near-zero RTO but costs two to four times a single-region deployment. Any AWS Certified Solutions Architect Professional will map your client’s actual RPO and RTO requirements to the appropriate tier before any infrastructure is provisioned, rather than defaulting to the most impressive-sounding option.
Cost Optimisation and Savings Plan Strategy
Compute Savings Plans cover EC2 and Fargate across instance families and Regions, which makes them more flexible than EC2 Reserved Instances for most mixed-architecture deployments. We model 90-day utilisation patterns, identify Spot-tolerant workloads, and recommend the commitment mix that matches actual usage. Rightsizing analysis on inherited environments regularly finds 30 to 40 percent of EC2 spend sitting on instances that were sized at launch and never revisited.
We also identify AWS Cost Explorer configuration issues that leave savings on the table, including missing resource tags and unlinked consolidated billing accounts.
Migration Pattern Selection
The six migration patterns exist because not every application should be refactored. Rehosting a legacy monolith as-is and migrating the database engine in parallel is sometimes the right call when timeline and risk tolerance make refactoring impractical. Refactoring to event-driven Lambda architectures is the right call when the workload pattern genuinely suits it. We have done both. Pattern selection decisions are documented as architecture decision records. Engineers working at AWS Certified Solutions Architect Professional level do not recommend the more complex path unless the architecture justifies it.
Security Baseline and Compliance Posture
Security Hub, GuardDuty, and AWS Config provide the detection and compliance layer. The harder work is getting the underlying architecture to a state where those tools are not generating 400 findings per day and your client has stopped looking at the dashboard. We build the security baseline alongside the architecture, not as an afterthought, and we use detective controls to identify drift rather than treating the initial deployment as permanent.
Why Architect Professional Depth Changes the Engagement
There is a difference between an AWS account that works and an AWS account that is designed. The former gets built incrementally, with each change made in response to the last problem. The latter starts from a documented architecture where the account structure, network topology, IAM design, and cost model are decided before the first resource is provisioned. The AWS Solutions Architect Professional credential was written around the second approach, and engineers who hold it have worked through those trade-offs formally.
Our team brings AWS Certified Solutions Architect Professional depth to every engagement through the NextEnvision Agency Partner Program. When you bring us in on an AWS architecture engagement, your client gets engineers who can defend every design decision under a Well-Architected review. Explore our delivered case studies to see what this looks like in practice.
Architecture Capabilities We Bring to AWS Engagements
The technical disciplines that separate architecture-grade delivery from standard cloud deployments.
Network topology design
Transit Gateway, VPC peering, PrivateLink, and Direct Connect each solve different connectivity problems and carry different cost structures. PrivateLink is the right answer for exposing a service to another VPC without opening a route table. Transit Gateway is the right answer when you have more than three VPCs sharing routes. An AWS Certified Solutions Architect Professional designs these topologies to remain manageable as account count grows, without requiring rearchitecting every time a new workload is added.
IAM and identity architecture
Permissions boundaries, permission sets in IAM Identity Center, cross-account roles, and Service Control Policies all operate at different layers. Getting these right means your client can enforce least-privilege without making everyday engineering tasks painful. Getting them wrong means a gradual drift toward wildcard policies applied at the account level because the correct approach became too difficult to maintain. IAM architecture is one of the areas where an AWS Certified Solutions Architect Professional engagement pays for itself quickly.
Database selection and configuration
RDS Multi-AZ with read replicas, Aurora Global Database, DynamoDB global tables, and ElastiCache each have distinct durability and latency characteristics. The AWS Solutions Architect Professional certification specifically tests the ability to match database configuration to recovery objectives, which is why the selection process matters more than the provisioning step. We document the configuration rationale so it is not lost when team members change.
Observability and operational readiness
CloudWatch dashboards, X-Ray service maps, and CloudTrail log aggregation in a centralised security account. We build the observability layer to make operational incidents diagnosable without needing to SSH into an instance or query a database directly. Alarm thresholds are calibrated against baseline metrics, not set to defaults, so on-call engineers are not ignoring alerts within two weeks of go-live.
AWS Architecture Delivered Under Your Agency Brand
We deliver AWS Certified Solutions Architect Professional-level architecture work entirely under your agency brand. Your client sees your team, your documents, and your Slack channel. They do not see NextEnvision. This matters for agencies that have built a technical reputation and want to expand their AWS capability without changing their client relationship structure.
Architecture decision records, runbooks, DR plans, and Well-Architected review reports are all produced in your agency’s template format if required. Explore our white-label development model to understand how the engagement structure works.
We currently support agencies across Australia, the UK, and Singapore. Engagement models range from single-sprint architecture assessments to ongoing embedded engineering on multi-year AWS programmes. The right structure depends on what your client needs and how your agency currently delivers.
Connect with us through the Agency Partner Program or reach out directly via our contact page to discuss a specific engagement.
Where AWS Architecture Engagements Go Wrong
The most common failure pattern we see is the architecture getting handed off from the team that designed it to the team that operates it, with no documentation of the decisions that went into the design. Six months later, an engineer removes a security group rule that seemed redundant and takes down cross-VPC connectivity that was not documented anywhere. The second common pattern is DR architecture that exists on paper and has never been tested. An AWS Certified Solutions Architect Professional engagement builds the architecture decision records, tagged resources, tested failover runbooks, and documented change process that prevent these failures before they occur.
Both failure patterns are preventable. The cost of building these practices into the engagement is substantially lower than the cost of the incidents they prevent. Pilot light configurations that were correct at build time but have drifted as production changed, and failover scripts that reference AMI IDs that no longer exist, are the kinds of issues a formal DR testing cycle catches before they matter.
How Agencies Engage NextEnvision for AWS Architecture Work
Four engagement structures matched to the way agencies scope and sell AWS projects.
Architecture sprint
A fixed two-week engagement covering a defined architecture scope: landing zone design, Well-Architected review, or DR architecture for a specific workload. Output is a documented architecture, decision records, and a prioritised implementation plan. AWS Certified Solutions Architect Professional-level work delivered in a defined sprint, suitable for agencies that have won the strategy work and need the technical depth to back it up before the build phase starts.
Implementation retainer
A monthly retainer covering ongoing AWS architecture and implementation work. Typically used by agencies running multi-cloud or AWS-primary client portfolios where architecture questions arise on an ongoing basis. Engineers are allocated to your client environment and participate in sprint planning, architecture reviews, and incident response as needed.
Embedded architect model
A dedicated AWS Certified Solutions Architect Professional-level engineer embedded in your agency or client team for a defined programme. They attend client meetings, produce client-facing documentation, and own the technical decisions for the engagement. Suitable for multi-year AWS programmes where your agency is the delivery partner and needs a senior technical resource without a permanent hire.
Migration project team
A full project team covering discovery, architecture, migration execution, and post-migration optimisation. Structured around your client’s wave plan, with defined milestones and delivery checkpoints. We have run migrations ranging from single-application rehosting to complex multi-tier refactoring projects. Learn more about our broader AWS development services or start a conversation through our discovery call process.
How We Deliver AWS Architecture Engagements
A six-phase delivery process that produces architecture, not just infrastructure.
Discovery and account audit
We start by mapping what exists. Account structure, VPC topology, IAM design, current spend profile, and any existing architecture documentation. When AWS Certified Solutions Architect Professional engineers audit an inherited environment, they find gaps between what was designed and what was built. Most environments have at least some of these gaps. The audit surfaces them and informs the scope of the architecture work ahead so there are no surprises mid-engagement.
Architecture design and decision documentation
The architecture is designed against the client’s requirements, documented in architecture decision records, and reviewed against the Well-Architected Framework before any resource is provisioned. Trade-offs are made explicit. Alternative approaches that were considered and rejected are documented alongside the reasons for rejection.
Security and governance baseline
Security Hub standards, GuardDuty, AWS Config rules, CloudTrail with log file validation, and SCPs aligned to the account structure are configured before the workload migration or build begins. Fixing the security posture after the workload is live is substantially more expensive and disruptive than building it correctly upfront.
Implementation and workload migration
Infrastructure as code using Terraform or AWS CDK, depending on the client’s existing tooling and team preference. Changes go through a defined approval process. Migration waves are sequenced by dependency and risk, with lower-risk applications migrated first to validate the landing zone and network configuration before the critical workloads move. AWS Certified Solutions Architect Professional-level engineers document every provisioning decision so the environment is comprehensible to the client’s own team after handover.
DR testing and runbook validation
DR architectures that have not been tested are not DR architectures. We run failover exercises against the documented RPO and RTO targets, update the runbooks based on what the test reveals, and repeat until the recovery process is reliable. Clients who skip this step typically discover the gaps during an actual incident.
Cost review and ongoing optimisation
Post-launch, we run a cost review against the deployment and compare actual usage patterns against the Savings Plan commitments and rightsizing recommendations. Architectures rarely run exactly as projected. The 90-day post-launch period is when utilisation data becomes reliable enough to make confident commitment decisions. This cost optimisation work is part of what separates an AWS Certified Solutions Architect Professional engagement from a standard cloud deployment, where the cost model is set at launch and rarely revisited.