Enterprise AWS architecture, on-premise migration, Lambda serverless applications, cost optimization, and security hardening. FreedomDev has 20+ years of custom software development in Zeeland, Michigan — we architect AWS infrastructure that scales with your business, not just your traffic. Projects range from $25K proof-of-concept deployments to $500K+ full enterprise migrations.
Amazon Web Services holds approximately 31% of the global cloud infrastructure market — more than Azure (25%) and Google Cloud (11%) combined. Over 200 services span compute, storage, databases, machine learning, IoT, and analytics. For enterprises evaluating cloud providers, AWS is the default starting point for a reason: it has the broadest service catalog, the most availability zones (over 100 across 30+ regions), and the deepest third-party ecosystem.
But market share does not equal good architecture. The majority of AWS bills we audit at FreedomDev reveal the same pattern: a team spun up EC2 instances three years ago, bolted on RDS, added an S3 bucket, and has been paying for oversized, always-on infrastructure ever since. No auto-scaling groups. No Reserved Instance commitments. No right-sizing analysis. No tagging strategy. The monthly bill grows 15-20% year over year and nobody can explain why because nobody architected the environment — it just accumulated.
The Well-Architected Framework exists precisely because AWS recognized this problem. Its six pillars — Operational Excellence, Security, Reliability, Performance Efficiency, Cost Optimization, and Sustainability — are not marketing abstractions. They are a structured review process that identifies architectural debt before it becomes a financial or security crisis. FreedomDev runs Well-Architected Reviews as the first engagement for every AWS client because the findings almost always pay for the entire review in month-one cost savings.
This page covers the five areas where we see the highest demand from enterprise clients: foundational cloud architecture that follows the Well-Architected Framework, on-premise to AWS migration using the AWS Migration Hub and the 7 Rs strategy, Lambda and serverless development for event-driven workloads, cost optimization through Reserved Instances, Savings Plans, and right-sizing, and security configuration including IAM policies, VPC design, and compliance automation with AWS Config. If you are a CTO, VP of Engineering, or IT Director evaluating AWS or trying to fix an AWS environment that has grown beyond control, this is the practical guide we built from two decades of enterprise infrastructure work.
FreedomDev is not an AWS reseller. We do not markup your AWS bill. We are a custom software development company that builds applications on AWS and architects the infrastructure those applications run on. Our incentive is to reduce your AWS spend, not inflate it — because our long-term relationship depends on trust, not margin on cloud credits.
Architecture design following the AWS Well-Architected Framework's six pillars. We design VPC topologies with public/private subnets across multiple availability zones, configure Application Load Balancers with path-based routing, set up Auto Scaling groups with target tracking policies, and implement multi-AZ RDS deployments with read replicas. The compute decision is critical: EC2 for long-running stateful workloads with predictable traffic, ECS/Fargate for containerized microservices that need dynamic scaling without managing hosts, Lambda for event-driven functions that run under 15 minutes. We make this decision based on your workload characteristics — request patterns, execution duration, state requirements, cold start tolerance — not ideology about serverless versus containers. Every architecture includes CloudWatch dashboards, SNS alerting, and CloudTrail audit logging from day one.
On-premise to AWS migration using the 7 Rs framework: Rehost (lift-and-shift to EC2), Replatform (move to managed services like RDS instead of self-managed databases), Refactor (re-architect for cloud-native patterns), Repurchase (replace with SaaS), Retain (keep on-premise for now), Retire (decommission), and Relocate (VMware Cloud on AWS). We use AWS Migration Hub to track the full portfolio, Application Discovery Service to map dependencies, and Database Migration Service for zero-downtime database cutover. A typical mid-market migration — 20-50 servers, 3-5 databases, mixed Windows/Linux — takes 3-6 months with a parallel-run validation period before decommissioning on-premise hardware. We handle the networking: AWS Direct Connect or Site-to-Site VPN for hybrid connectivity during the transition, Route 53 DNS cutover, and ACM certificate provisioning.
Serverless application architecture using Lambda, API Gateway, DynamoDB, SQS, SNS, Step Functions, and EventBridge. Lambda pricing is $0.20 per million invocations plus $0.0000166667 per GB-second of compute — for event-driven workloads with variable traffic, the cost savings versus always-on EC2 instances are substantial. We build Lambda functions in Python, Node.js, and .NET, package them with Lambda Layers for shared dependencies, and deploy through SAM (Serverless Application Model) or Terraform. Step Functions orchestrate multi-step workflows — order processing, ETL pipelines, approval chains — with built-in retry logic, error handling, and visual execution monitoring. Cold start mitigation for latency-sensitive endpoints uses Provisioned Concurrency or SnapStart for Java runtimes. We also build event-driven architectures with EventBridge rules triggering Lambda functions from S3 uploads, DynamoDB Streams, SQS messages, or custom application events.
AWS cost optimization that typically reduces monthly spend by 25-40% without performance degradation. The three levers: right-sizing (Compute Optimizer recommendations to downsize over-provisioned EC2 instances — most environments have 30-40% of instances running at under 20% CPU utilization), commitment discounts (Reserved Instances provide up to 72% savings for 1-3 year terms; Savings Plans offer similar discounts with more flexibility across instance families), and architectural changes (S3 Intelligent-Tiering automatically moves objects between access tiers; Glacier and Glacier Deep Archive for compliance data at $0.00099/GB/month; Aurora Serverless v2 scales to zero for development databases; spot instances for fault-tolerant batch workloads at up to 90% discount). We implement AWS Cost Explorer dashboards, set up Budgets with threshold alerts, enforce tagging policies through AWS Organizations SCPs, and configure Cost Allocation Tags so every dollar traces back to a team, project, or environment.
Security architecture built on least-privilege IAM policies, not the admin-access-everywhere pattern we find in 80% of AWS audits. We implement IAM Identity Center (formerly SSO) for centralized access, define permission boundaries to limit maximum privileges, enforce MFA on all human users, and use IAM roles with temporary credentials for service-to-service communication — never long-lived access keys. Network security includes VPC design with private subnets for databases and application tiers, Security Groups as stateful firewalls, NACLs for subnet-level rules, and AWS WAF on CloudFront or ALB for OWASP top 10 protection. Compliance automation uses AWS Config rules to continuously evaluate resource configurations, Security Hub for aggregated findings, and GuardDuty for threat detection. For regulated industries — HIPAA, SOC 2, PCI-DSS, FedRAMP — we configure AWS Artifact compliance reports, enable CloudTrail organization-wide with S3 log archival and integrity validation, and implement encryption at rest (KMS) and in transit (ACM certificates, TLS 1.2+ enforcement) across every service.
Every AWS environment we build is defined in code — either CloudFormation (native AWS, YAML/JSON, deep service integration, drift detection built in) or Terraform (multi-cloud, HCL syntax, stronger state management, broader provider ecosystem). The choice depends on your context: CloudFormation if you are AWS-only and want tight integration with AWS service launches; Terraform if you run multi-cloud or hybrid infrastructure and need a single tool across AWS, Azure, and on-premise. We write modular, reusable templates: VPC modules, ECS service modules, RDS modules, Lambda deployment modules — all version-controlled in Git, deployed through CI/CD pipelines (CodePipeline or GitHub Actions), and tested with cfn-lint or tflint before any change hits production. No more clicking through the AWS Console to create resources. No more undocumented infrastructure that only one person understands. Every change is a pull request, reviewed, approved, and auditable.
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We were running 40 Windows servers in a co-location facility with a lease renewal coming up. FreedomDev migrated everything to AWS in four months — rehosted the critical apps to EC2, moved our SQL Server databases to RDS, and rebuilt our batch processing on Lambda. Our infrastructure costs dropped 35% in the first year, and we eliminated the weekend maintenance windows our IT team had been doing for a decade.
Your company runs 30 Windows Server instances in a co-location facility. The lease renewal is in 9 months and hardware is aging. A lift-and-shift migration to EC2 gets you off the hardware immediately — AWS Server Migration Service replicates your VMs to AMIs, you test in a staging VPC, and cut over with minimal downtime. Phase two replatforms: SQL Server moves to RDS for SQL Server (or Aurora PostgreSQL if you are willing to refactor queries), file shares move to FSx for Windows File Server, Active Directory moves to AWS Managed Microsoft AD. The co-location lease ends, and your infrastructure is now elastic, backed up automatically, and distributed across availability zones for the first time.
An e-commerce or B2B order system where order volume spikes 10x during promotions. Instead of provisioning EC2 capacity for peak load that sits idle 90% of the time, the architecture uses API Gateway receiving orders, SQS for durable queuing, Lambda for processing, Step Functions for orchestrating the workflow (validate inventory, charge payment, update ERP, trigger fulfillment, send confirmation), and DynamoDB for order state. At 100,000 orders per month, Lambda compute costs roughly $2-5 — compared to $200+/month for an always-on EC2 instance. The architecture scales to millions of orders without any capacity planning because every component is serverless.
A growing company with 50+ developers needs environment isolation: production, staging, development, shared services, security, and log archive — each in its own AWS account under an AWS Organization. Service Control Policies (SCPs) enforce guardrails: no resources outside approved regions, no public S3 buckets, no EC2 instances without required tags. AWS Control Tower automates account provisioning with baseline security. Cross-account access uses IAM Identity Center with permission sets mapped to Azure AD groups. Centralized logging aggregates CloudTrail, VPC Flow Logs, and Config data into a dedicated security account. This is the governance foundation that prevents the chaos of a single shared account where everyone has admin access.
Your application runs in us-east-1 and you need a recovery plan if the entire region goes down. RPO (Recovery Point Objective) and RTO (Recovery Time Objective) determine the architecture: Pilot Light (RTO 1-2 hours, lowest cost) keeps AMIs, RDS snapshots, and S3 data replicated to us-west-2 with infrastructure defined in CloudFormation ready to launch; Warm Standby (RTO 15-30 minutes) runs a scaled-down copy of production in the DR region behind Route 53 health checks; Multi-Site Active-Active (RTO near-zero) runs full production in both regions with Global Accelerator or CloudFront routing. FreedomDev designs the DR tier that matches your business requirements and budget — then tests it quarterly with actual failover exercises, not just documentation.