Frequently Asked Questions

A Cloud Above Us is an AWS-focused cloud consulting firm based in Northern Virginia, United States. We help nonprofits and small and medium businesses cut their AWS spend, scale for growth and traffic events, and build infrastructure that stays up. Every piece of work is handed back documented, so keeping the lights on never depends on us being available.

A Cloud Above Us works primarily with nonprofits and small and medium businesses (SMBs) whose monthly AWS bills range from about $2,000 to $150,000.

No. A Cloud Above Us is AWS-focused. Our experience and every service we offer are built around Amazon Web Services environments.

No. A Cloud Above Us does not offer migrations as a service. We work with teams already running on AWS, either to get an environment back under control after growth or to prepare it for upcoming growth.

A Cloud Above Us is a small team, and we would rather be clear up front than take on work we can't do at our quality bar. We do not offer:

• Full-service managed services (MSP) that own your technology stack, website and operations end to end
• 24/7 responsiveness
• Ongoing ownership of production systems
• Updates, maintenance or troubleshooting of your application or other software

Instead we focus on engagements with defined goals that have a distinct start and end. More on the Our Difference page.

Yes. Everyone at A Cloud Above Us is a US citizen, so we can work on ITAR-restricted systems running in AWS GovCloud accounts.

A Cloud Above Us is based in Northern Virginia, United States. Our working hours are US Eastern Time (UTC-5, or UTC-4 during daylight saving time), and we work with anyone whose day overlaps with that, primarily clients in the Americas, Africa and western Europe.

A Cloud Above Us offers three AWS consulting services:

• Scaling and events: Auto Scaling, service quotas and load balancer and database headroom, so you handle daily load and one-time or recurring traffic spikes without overpaying.
• Cost and performance optimization: lowering your AWS bill with the right mix of purchase options and instance types sized from real usage, while keeping or improving stability.
• Architecture and resilience: finding single points of failure, setting availability targets from your business needs, and fixing the causes of repeated pages.

Details are on the Services page.

Yes. A Cloud Above Us plans for launches, promotions, big events and daily surges as one of its core services. We build a plan that balances availability against cost, whether you expect a 3x surge or a 300x one. We review reactive and proactive Auto Scaling policies, service quotas, and load balancer and database headroom, and give equal attention to scaling in as well as scaling out.

A Cloud Above Us starts with your Cost and Usage Report (CUR), then reviews the actual resources in your accounts and maps cost to applications and environments. From there we balance purchase options (On-Demand, Spot and Savings Plans), size instance types from real usage data, and find where resources can be safely shared. Every recommendation is specific enough to act on, and the goal is lower spend while maintaining or improving stability.

Fixed-price AWS assessments from A Cloud Above Us start at $1,500. All prices are in US dollars:

• Scalability, $1,500: scaling design for daily load and event spikes, with emergency playbooks.
• Core, $1,500: 5 AWS services reviewed, for spend under $20k a month, with a detailed cost report.
• Workload, $3,500: 12 AWS services reviewed, for spend under $75k a month. Includes everything in Core and Scalability, plus performance and availability risk reports and a Compute Savings Plan strategy.
• Comprehensive, $7,500: 40 AWS services reviewed. Includes everything in Workload, plus fault-tolerance testing and a per-request cost breakdown of your top workload.

Implementation work is quoted per project at a fixed price, paid in milestones as each is delivered. Full details are on the Pricing page.

No. With A Cloud Above Us you keep the full written assessment report whether or not we do the remediation. You choose which findings, if any, you want our help with, and we give you a fixed-price quote for that work.

Yes. A Cloud Above Us is happy to price more focused work, such as a review of just your Savings Plans or just your load balancers rather than a full account review. Custom doesn't always mean more expensive.

A Cloud Above Us offers a monthly retained option for teams that want an experienced engineer on hand for ongoing advice and design review, cost monitoring and alerts, and a quarterly architecture review. A retainer is never required: most engagements are a fixed-price assessment, a fixed-price project, or both.

An engagement with A Cloud Above Us has four stages, and you take only the ones you need:

1. Assess: we map what is running and what it costs, then deliver a prioritized, costed list of what to change.
2. Plan: we review the findings together and you decide what, if anything, you want help with. You get a fixed-price quote.
3. Implementation: we either own the changes or write a detailed plan for your team to carry out, with weekly reviews.
4. Hand over: runbooks, architecture notes and a working session with your team.

More on the How We Work page.

Yes. If you already have a specific project in mind, A Cloud Above Us can start directly at implementation. Since every project is different there is no preset price; we quote after discussing your exact needs.

For an assessment, A Cloud Above Us needs read-only access to your AWS accounts, the bill, and whatever documentation already exists.

A Cloud Above Us was founded by Shahad, an ex-AWS Senior Cloud Support Engineer who spent 9 years at AWS solving problems for thousands of customers. He was a certified Subject Matter Expert in the three Auto Scaling services and in Elastic Load Balancers, and has over 15 years of IT experience in total.

He personally leads every engagement, bringing in other expert engineers where a project needs them. There are no sales reps and no handover to a junior team after the first call: you talk to the engineers doing the work from start to finish.

Either, your choice. A Cloud Above Us can act as your implementation partner and own the changes, or architect a detailed plan for your own team to implement. Both include weekly reviews to keep the work on track.

Everything A Cloud Above Us builds is infrastructure as code in a repository you own, with runbooks, architecture notes and a handover session with your team. Documentation is written for the person who inherits it. The measure of a good handover is that you could stop working with us the next day and nothing would break.

Yes. Every engagement with A Cloud Above Us starts with a free, no-obligation 30-minute call. We will tell you honestly whether we are a good fit for your problem, and if the work does not need doing, we will say so.

The quickest way is to book a free 30-minute call at https://calendar.app.google/xxsgwxZ4mVKcxsgKA. You can also email hello@acloudabove.us, call (703) 721-8347, or send a message with the contact form at the bottom of any page on https://acloudabove.us.