Stratus10

09/21/2026

What is a forward-deployed engineer and why does your AI project need one?

A forward-deployed engineer (FDE) works alongside your team to understand a business problem, build the solution, and help people put it to use. They stay involved as it moves from prototype to operation.

That work can span AI applications, data integrations, and the cloud infrastructure supporting them.

With Stratus10’s AI consulting services, our forward-deployed engineers bring AI and AWS expertise directly to your team. We help you:

🎯 Prioritize AI opportunities based on business value, feasibility, data readiness, and cost.
🤝 Roll out AI tools with role-specific training, practical workflows, and support as employees adopt them.
🛠️ Build custom AI applications on Amazon Bedrock that work with your structured and unstructured data.
💻 Establish coding standards and review practices for teams using Anthropic developer tools.
🔒 Build and operate the supporting AWS infrastructure, with access controls, monitoring, and security built in.
💡 Secure AWS funding to test your use case through a proof of concept.

Have an AI initiative that needs hands-on engineering? Reach out.

Explore our services: https://stratus10.com/ai-consulting-services

Put AI to work with strategy, team training, and hands-on AWS implementation from Stratus10’s forward-deployed engineers. Talk to an AI consultant.

09/16/2026

We asked 13 cloud and DevOps leaders one question: what's the single automation that made the biggest difference in your day-to-day work?

The answers ranged from GPU autoscaling (one team cut idle costs by 34%) to AI-powered self-healing systems that catch problems before anyone's paged. But the real pattern wasn't the tools — it was the approach. Every one of them started small: pick the task that causes the most daily pain, automate that first, then build from there.

If your team has a long list of "things we should automate," this is worth a read before you pick where to start.

Read the full roundup: https://stratus10.com/blog/cloud-automation-strategies

Real cloud infrastructure automations that cut manual work, build better systems. 13 tech leaders share their tips. Get more insights from Stratus10.

09/09/2026

Amazon Bedrock is one of the best on-ramps AWS has built for GenAI, giving teams managed access to top foundation models without standing up their own infrastructure. Most conversations about it begin with which foundation model to use, but that's rarely the right starting point.

Get the data layer wrong and your Knowledge Base starts citing things it never should have touched, your embedding bill creeps up, and untangling it all later is a mess.

Here's where teams get tripped up:

📜 Data locality: your data doesn't always live where Bedrock expects it, and bridging accounts or systems comes with auth and networking overhead
🔍 Data structure: S3 documents, structured data, and multimodal files like images and PDFs each need a different ingestion path
🪄 Scale limits: Bedrock Data Automation caps out at 1,000 files per job, so anything bigger needs a different approach
💸 Cost: embeddings, multimodal parsing, and re-indexing unchanged files add up fast

None of this shows up in the reference architecture diagrams, but engineers run into these issues while building. Get the data layer right, though, and Bedrock delivers exactly what it promises: a fast, managed path to production-ready GenAI.

What's the best Bedrock lesson you've picked up?

Full breakdown on Bedrock data ingestion tips & best practices 👇
https://stratus10.com/blog/amazon-bedrock-data-ingestion-best-practices

08/21/2026

Ever notice how nobody on your team can say which EC2 AMI is the approved one?

AWS accounts multiply fast, and images pile up right along with them. A few practices keep that sprawl under control across multi-account environments:

🏭 Build AMIs once in a central pipeline instead of separately in each account
🏷️ Tag every AMI with owner, source, and compliance info
🔁 Require boot tests and vulnerability scans before promoting to production

An outdated AMI doesn't stop working just because it's outdated. Full breakdown in the comments 👇

7 engineers explain how to automate AMI creation, versioning, and cleanup with EC2 Image Builder across multiple AWS accounts. Learn more from Stratus10.

08/19/2026

CVSS score tells you how bad a vulnerability could be, but not whether it's reachable in your environment. Here's what the most effective teams do when handling remediation:

🎯 Triage by exposure and business risk
👤 Assign an owner and a deadline to every finding
✅ Require proof of a fix, such as a merged PR or a scan result

👉 Full breakdown:

Ten security leaders explain how they handle vulnerability remediation for compliance, from risk-based triage to automated CI/CD fixes.

07/23/2026

Automation debt behaves like tech debt: the longer you wait, the more it costs to fix.

We asked 13 engineering leaders what automation actually saved them time. The best automations were the targeted ones:

🛠 IaC turns a bad deploy into a 6-minute git revert, not a fire drill.
⚡ Scale on queue depth, not CPU. One team cut P95 latency 30%.
🧟 Default TTLs kill zombie environments before anyone notices the bill.
🚨 A circuit breaker before the happy path to halt bad data, don't just alert on it.

Pick the one task your team dreads and automate it, then compound from there.

👉 Full breakdown: https://stratus10.com/blog/cloud-automation-strategies

What's the first thing you automated?

13 tech leaders share the cloud automation strategies that cut hours of manual work—from cloud infrastructure automation to self-healing systems. Find your first win.

07/21/2026

Cloud cost optimization has become a strategic engineering discipline. Beyond cost cutting, it's about aligning architecture, operations, and business outcomes so every dollar delivers value.

Large enterprises have dedicated FinOps teams and predictive analytics. SMBs win through clarity and agility: embedding visibility, ownership, and automation into their workflows.

Here's what lean teams should be doing now:

✅ Achieve full visibility across cloud services
✅ Connect spend to business value
✅ Automate rightsizing, scheduling, shutdowns
✅ Include FinOps in sprint cycles

👉 Learn more: https://stratus10.com/blog/cloud-cost-optimization-strategies-2026

We help organizations achieve sustainable cloud cost optimization through strategic architecture design and intelligent cloud management. https://stratus10.com/kalos

07/14/2026

We partnered with Kinectify, an anti-money laundering (AML) software provider, to build a fully automated Terraform CI/CD pipeline on Azure with GitHub Actions.

Check out the case study 👉 https://stratus10.com/case-studies/terraform-cicd-github-actions

07/01/2026

We asked 16 security pros what cloud mistake causes the most damage. Most gave the same answer: too much access, granted "temporarily," never taken back.

🔒 Service accounts end up with more privilege than actual employees
⚠️ "Temporary" access from a migration or crunch time rarely gets revoked
✅ A quarterly access review catches most of it

How often does your team review who has access to what: quarterly, or "whenever we remember"?

We broke down all 16 answers plus an 8-question IAM checklist. Here's the breakdown 👇
https://kaloscloud.io/blog/cloud-security-misconfigurations

Experts share the cloud security misconfigurations they see most and how to avoid common pitfalls. Includes IAM risks to audit and a quick IAM risk assessment.

06/23/2026

There's an order of operations to getting AWS under control.

🔒 Enable MFA on root, delete root access keys, turn on S3 Block Public Access
🛡️ Flip on GuardDuty, Security Hub, and IAM Access Analyzer
💸 Open Cost Explorer, set Budgets with alerts, pull Compute Optimizer recommendations
📋 Activate AWS Config and CloudTrail
✅ Check Trusted Advisor and Savings Plans coverage

These basics hit on 3 things most teams need to fix: spend visibility, security, and cutting manual work.

What else would you add to this order of operations?

If you want to verify you've got the basics covered and where you could improve spend/security, request a free consultation 👉 stratus10.com/contact-us