CloudFalcon

Mentorship for cloud, DevOps and platform engineers.

  • Since 2015
  • 100+ engineers trained
  • 25+ companies
  • 50+ production projects

One-to-one sessions with engineers who have built and run production infrastructure for over ten years. We help people get their first cloud job, move up to senior and platform roles, pass AWS, CKA and Terraform exams, and prepare for FAANG interviews.

Book a free 30-minute callSee pricing

01Who it's for

Career switchers
Coming from IT support, sysadmin work or another field, and aiming for a first cloud or DevOps job.
Mid-level engineers
Already shipping, and working towards senior, SRE or platform roles.
Exam and interview prep
Studying for AWS, CKA or Terraform certifications, or preparing for FAANG system design and infrastructure interviews.
Engineering teams
Teams moving to cloud-native practices that want an experienced engineer alongside them.

02Topics

Pick one or combine a few. Sessions mix explanation with hands-on work and reviews of what you build.

TopicWhat it coversGood for
Getting into cloudLinux, networking, one cloud provider and a first project, in an order that makes sense.Career switch
Infrastructure as codeTerraform, CDK and Pulumi: modules, state, testing and CI.Terraform
KubernetesWorkloads, networking, Helm, and GitOps with Argo CD or Flux.CKA / CKAD
CI/CD and platformsPipelines, release processes and internal developer platforms.Platform
Cloud securityIAM, network boundaries, secrets and compliance checks.DevSecOps
Observability and SREMetrics, logs, traces, alerting and on-call.SRE
CertificationsStudy plans, labs and practice exams for AWS, CKA and Terraform Associate.AWS / CKA
FAANG interviewsMock system design, infrastructure and behavioral interviews, with feedback after each one.Interviews
Senior and staff growthDesign docs, technical ownership and leading projects.Senior+
Team mentoringRegular sessions and reviews for a whole engineering team.Teams

03Tools

Cloud
AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Cloudflare, DigitalOcean, Oracle Cloud, OpenStack
Infrastructure as code
Terraform, Pulumi, AWS CDK, Crossplane, Atlantis, tflint, Infracost
Kubernetes
Helm, Kustomize, Argo CD, Flux, Istio, Ingress NGINX, Kubecost
Observability and security
Prometheus, Loki, Datadog, Trivy, Prowler, TruffleHog, OPA

04How it works

  1. Free intro call

    30 minutes on video. We talk about where you are, where you want to get to, and whether mentoring is the right way to get there.

  2. A written plan

    You get a roadmap with milestones and resources. We update it as you go.

    • Notion

  3. Sessions and reviews

    Regular 1:1 calls. Between calls we review your code, Terraform and pull requests.

    • GitHub

  4. Help in between

    Questions go in Slack. Goals and progress are tracked in Linear.

    • Slack
    • Linear
Example plan: a 12-week Career Track for someone moving into cloud.
  1. Weeks 1–2Linux, networking and Git
  2. Weeks 3–4AWS core: IAM, VPC, EC2, S3
  3. Weeks 5–6Terraform modules, state and CI
  4. Weeks 7–8Containers and Kubernetes
  5. Weeks 9–10Portfolio project: deploy, monitor, secure
  6. Weeks 11–12Mock interviews and applications

05Reference architecture

A web app on AWS with no single point of failure.

us-east-1 runs active and us-west-2 is a warm standby, with two Availability Zones in each region.

Highly available multi-region web app on AWSUsers reach Route 53 and CloudFront, protected by AWS WAF and Shield Advanced. CloudFront sends traffic to an Application Load Balancer in us-east-1, the active region, which spreads requests across stateless EC2 instances in two Availability Zones. The app keeps sessions in ElastiCache and data in an Aurora writer with a reader in the second zone; slow jobs go through SQS to a Lambda worker that sends email with SES. us-west-2 runs the same stack as a warm standby: Aurora Global Database and ElastiCache Global Datastore replicate data across regions, CloudFront fails over to the standby load balancer, and S3, Secrets Manager, KMS keys and AWS Backup are copied cross-region.AWS Cloudus-east-1 · Primary region (active)VPCPublic subnetsPrivate subnets · App + VPC endpointsPrivate subnets · DataAuto Scaling group (min 2, across AZs)us-west-2 · Secondary region (warm standby)VPCPublic subnetsPrivate subnets · App + VPC endpointsPrivate subnets · DataAuto Scaling group (min 2, across AZs)Availability Zone aAvailability Zone bAvailability Zone aAvailability Zone bAsync jobs (outsideVPC, via endpoints)replicasessions / cacheenqueue jobtriggerafter 3 failsreads / writesAsync jobs (outsideVPC, via endpoints)replicasessions / cacheenqueue jobtriggerafter 3 failsreads (read-only until failover)originstaticfailover originstaticAurora Global DatabaseRPO ≈ 1 sElastiCache GlobalDatastoreCross-region: S3 CRR · Secrets Manager replica · KMS multi-Region key · AWS Backup copyApplication LB(multi-AZ)NAT GatewayAZ aNAT GatewayAZ bEC2 (stateless)AZ aEC2 (stateless)AZ bElastiCacheMulti-AZ primaryAurora writerAurora readerAZ bAmazon S3primary bucketSecrets ManagerprimaryKMS multi-RegionkeyAWS BackupvaultCloudWatch+ SyntheticsSQS dead-letterqueueAmazon SQSemail-jobs queueLambda workerrender + sendAmazon SESemails to customersApplication LB(multi-AZ)NAT GatewayAZ aNAT GatewayAZ bEC2 (stateless)AZ aEC2 (stateless)AZ bElastiCacheGlobal secondaryAurora GlobalsecondaryAurora readerAZ bAmazon S3CRR replicaSecrets ManagerreplicaKMS replicakeyAWS Backupcopy vaultCloudWatch+ SyntheticsSQS dead-letterqueueAmazon SQSemail-jobs queueLambda workerstandby (same code)Amazon SESemails to customersUsersRoute 53+ health checks / ARCCloudFrontorigin groupsAWS ShieldAdvancedAWS WAF
Public internetIn regionVPC to VPCPublic subnetPrivate subnetReplication / failover

Resilience controls

Stateless app tier
Sessions and cache in ElastiCache, nothing on the instance.
Warm standby
us-west-2 ASG min 2, AMIs and launch templates copied, scale out on failover.
Data failover
Aurora Global Database managed failover; ElastiCache Global Datastore promotion.
Traffic failover
CloudFront origin groups (GET/HEAD); the origin hostname is a Route 53 failover record with health checks, so writes fail over too; ARC for a controlled switch.
No AZ dependency
NAT Gateway per AZ, VPC endpoints for AWS APIs, min 2 AZs per tier.
One codebase
Terraform deploys both regions identically, no drift.
Backups
AWS Backup + Aurora PITR, cross-region copy vault.
Detection
CloudWatch alarms (ALB 5xx, replica lag, ASG health), Synthetics canaries.
Edge protection
AWS WAF + Shield Advanced on CloudFront and Route 53.
Prove it
AWS FIS experiments and a quarterly failover game day.
Async work
SQS + DLQ decouples slow jobs (emails, exports) from requests; Lambda retries, nothing lost if a worker fails.
Targets
SLA 99.9% · RTO and RPO agreed per workload.
  • AWS FIS chaos tests
  • CloudWatch alarms + canaries
  • AWS Backup cross-region

06Your mentor

Mohammed Almusaddar

Senior Cloud and DevOps Engineer · Madrid, Spain

Mohammed started out running infrastructure on-premises, as IT infrastructure manager at Al-Aqsa University in Gaza: the campus network, data centre and backups for over 27,000 students and 1,200 staff.

In 2017 he moved into cloud and DevOps, working remotely from Gaza for consultancies and product teams in the US, the UK, Germany and Italy. It's the same switch many mentees are making. Since then he has led AWS and Azure platforms built with Terraform, Pulumi and CDK, and run them in production.

Now
Senior DevOps Engineer at Nuvolar in Madrid, and Senior AWS Cloud Engineer at Schematic (US, remote).
Before
AWS DevOps Lead at Snaile, Azure DevOps Lead at UNRWA, AWS DevOps Engineer at globaldatanet, DevOps Engineer at UNICC and at Flux7 (now part of NTT Data).
On Upwork
55+ completed contracts since 2016 and 45+ client reviews, including 1:1 tutoring and pair-programming sessions on Terraform, HashiCorp tools and AWS.
Certifications
AWS Certified SysOps Administrator, AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate, HashiCorp Certified: Terraform Associate. Named a HashiCorp Ambassador in 2023.
Education
Master of Engineering in Computer Science, Islamic University of Gaza.

From his Upwork reviews

“His work was always high quality and delivered on time, and he's very easy to communicate with and work with. I would definitely hire Mohammed again for future projects.”
Five-star review · Pulumi infrastructure and AWS migration, 2024
“Mohammed took all the hard parts of our Ansible playbooks and rewrote them and reworked them to get them right, and I mean perfect. Highly recommended.”
Five-star review · Ansible playbook review, 2020
“Mohammed is a highly talented, top notch DevOps expert. Just wish we could work with him more!”
Five-star review · OpenStack-Ansible build with Terraform, 2017

07Pricing

Every plan starts with a free 30-minute call.

  • Single session

    $50per session

    A 60-minute call on any topic. Bring your IaC, pipeline or résumé for review. You get written next steps afterwards.

    Book a call

  • Monthly

    $180per month

    Four 60-minute calls a month, chat between sessions, code and pull request reviews, and a personal roadmap.

    Book a call

  • Career Track

    $500for 3 months

    Monthly for three months, plus a portfolio project built end to end, a certification plan and mock interviews.

    Book a call

  • Teams

    Custom

    Regular sessions and reviews for a whole engineering team, priced per team.

    Email us

Prices in US dollars.

08Get started

The first call is free.

30 minutes on video. Pick a time that suits you, or email first if you prefer. You'll leave with clear next steps, whether or not you sign up.

Book a free 30-minute call
Email
info@cloudfalcon.dev