From One to Hundreds: Reflections on a Decade of Building the Trenches

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Presented at fwd:cloudsec Europe 2025 by

Joel Thompson

In today's technology economy, people frequently move jobs before getting to experience the long-term consequences (both good and bad) of the decisions they made. In contrast, I spent over a decade at my previous company both building out their AWS footprint as well as building internal software for business users on top of that AWS footprint. This gave me perspectives on both sides of the fence -- both wanting to ensure our AWS account fleet was well managed and secure while also needing to deliver value to the business using it. In this talk, I'll offer some reflections from both perspectives about the good and the bad of decisions I made as our account fleet grew from a single AWS lab account into hundreds of AWS accounts supporting different business units.