How the Lab started.

When I decided to open my first AWS account, I had no way of understanding the learning I would demand of myself. A traditional backend engineer, I spent my day working on databases and business logic, AWS was about to forcefully eject me out of my silo into a world with many more concerns.

As cloud engineering and its associated disciplines matured, so did the AWS infrastructure I had configured in my environment, serving as a safe area for me to learn and explore. Over time, the environment I created for learning at home became a blueprint for my client and employers' AWS foundations. Initially, it provided my colleagues with an environment in which to learn, and quickly it became the foundation for running significant production workloads.

One of my colleagues asked how I developed working knowledge of a new AWS service overnight after a discussion in the office the day before. I showed my team member the lab, and they asked if they could have one. So began the creation of this website—a way for me to document and share, enabling anyone to operate and run an enterprise-grade AWS environment at home or in the office.

Throughout this site, you’ll find “GPT Question” boxes — snapshots of questions I’ve asked a large language model (LLM) like ChatGPT and Amazon Q.
I use LLMs to explore ideas, research technical topics, test assumptions, and challenge my thinking. They're not just productivity tools — they're tools that help me expand my approach to problem solving.

Sometimes the answers are exactly what I need. Sometimes they spark a better question. Either way, they’re part of the learning journey.

Who is Autobat Industries?

Autobat Industries is my home base for cloud architecture, engineering, and experimentation.

As a cloud architect and builder, I use this site to share what I’ve learned - from designing secure, scalable environments to exploring the latest AWS services, to building labs that double as client-ready blueprints and personal sandboxes.

This site is part portfolio, part documentation, and part ongoing experiment.
It reflects the work I do helping clients design modern cloud platforms and the work I do for myself to stay sharp, test ideas, and explore new patterns.

Whether you’re building your first VPC or rolling out multi-account foundations, you’ll find lessons, code, architecture patterns, and commentary here - including where things break, what works in practice, and what’s worth rethinking.

Stay curious. Stay secure. Start building.

A bit of a to-do list of what I will be covering...

- Landing zone creation and management, including how SSO and STS are used to work within it

- Cost monitoring and account inspection (GuardDuty, Inspector, SecurityHub)

- PayloadCMS and Next.js static rendering - How this website is operated for minimal cost

- Networking and security

- Site-to-site VPN from home to cloud on a budget

- Datalake and Lambda to monitor and manage home solar and battery systems

- ML playground

- Datalake for home accounting

- EC2 for gaming servers

- ECS for anything you can think of