Case Studies | PropTech

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Well-Architected Framework Review

About

A PropTech business working with Cloud Combinator on AWS. The client is anonymised at their request.

Challenge

The review focused on four areas, mapped to the pillars of the Well-Architected Framework.

Consistency and governance

Resources had grown without a shared standard. The first focus was a standardised tagging taxonomy and reusable gold-standard base configurations for Lambda, S3 and API Gateway, so consistency, security and cost attribution were baked into every deployment.

Security and private networking

The environment needed to move to a zero-trust posture. The second focus was least-privilege IAM, moving data services into private subnets with VPC endpoints, enforcing encryption at rest and in transit, and putting AWS WAF in front of API Gateway.

Observability and resilience

Issues needed to be caught early and recovered cleanly. The third focus was CloudWatch dashboards and alarms, X-Ray tracing, structured logging, SNS notifications, and automated backup with tested recovery procedures.

Scalable governance

A single account limited isolation and control. The final focus was a multi-account landing zone with AWS Organizations and Control Tower, guardrails, and continuous compliance so standards stay enforced as the estate grows.

Solution

Cloud Combinator worked through the environment pillar by pillar, delivering each fix as a tested CloudFormation template so the remediations were reproducible rather than one-off console changes.

9

AWS service areas hardened with remediation templates

6

Well-Architected pillars addressed

Gold

Reusable base-config IaC for Lambda, S3 and API Gateway

By the numbers:

  • 9 - AWS service areas hardened with remediation templates
  • 6 - Well-Architected pillars addressed
  • Gold - Reusable base-config IaC for Lambda, S3 and API Gateway
Changes

Cloud Combinator delivered the review and its remediations as tested, reusable infrastructure-as-code, transforming the client's environment into a secure, observable and well-governed platform aligned to the Well-Architected Framework.

  • Consistency by default — A standardised tagging taxonomy and gold-standard base configs mean security, logging and cost attribution are built into every deployment.
  • A zero-trust security posture — Least-privilege IAM, private networking with VPC endpoints, encryption at rest and AWS WAF on API Gateway close the main exposure gaps.
  • Eyes on the platform — CloudWatch dashboards and alarms, X-Ray tracing, structured logging and SNS alerting make issues visible and actionable.
  • Governed for scale — A multi-account landing zone with Organizations, Control Tower and AWS Config guardrails keeps standards enforced as the estate grows.
  • Handover — Included the gold-standard IaC templates in a central repository and training for the client's engineers on using the new baselines.

With a hardened, well-governed foundation and reusable templates in hand, the client can deploy new workloads to a consistent, secure standard from day one, and has a clear roadmap for extending the same best practices to its SageMaker machine learning work.

AWS Stack

AWS Identity

And Access Management, with Access Analyzer, for least-privilege roles and policies.

AWS WAF

For application-layer protection in front of Amazon API Gateway.

Amazon CloudWatch

And AWS X-Ray for dashboards, alarms, tracing and observability.

AWS Backup

For automated backup and tested recovery of critical data.

AWS Organizations

And Control Tower for a governed, multi-account landing zone.

AWS Config

And AWS CloudFormation for continuous compliance and reusable, gold-standard deployments.

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