AWS's vast ecosystem of services powers everything from small startups to global enterprises. For platform teams managing AWS infrastructure at scale, this guide provides practical, battle-tested approaches to keeping AWS manageable as your organization grows. With re:Invent underway, we're seeing even more innovations that showcase the platform's incredible capabilities. But for platform teams managing AWS at scale, that power comes with significant complexity.

After spending years managing cloud infrastructure and AWS resources across different organizations, I want to share some practical approaches to keeping AWS manageable as your organization grows. These insights come from real-world experience working with platform teams tackling similar challenges.

Key Challenges in AWS Resource Management at Scale

Most AWS platform teams face several core challenges when managing cloud infrastructure:

1. Resource sprawl is a natural consequence of growth - Organizations typically start with basic services like EC2 and S3. As teams and requirements grow, infrastructure expands to include Lambda functions across multiple regions, development and staging environments, and specialized services like ECS clusters and RDS instances.

2. Configuration drift happens gradually but consistently - Even with solid Infrastructure as Code practices, real-world operations introduce variance. Emergency fixes, developer testing environments, and routine troubleshooting can all lead to divergence between intended and actual configurations.

3. Console management doesn't scale with your team - The AWS Console is an excellent tool for learning and troubleshooting, but managing resources across multiple services, regions, and accounts requires a more streamlined approach.

4. Developer velocity vs. platform control - Platform teams want to enable developer productivity while maintaining security and cost controls. Finding this balance without creating bottlenecks is a persistent challenge.

Practical AWS Solutions That Actually Work

Through years of experience, here are the approaches that consistently help teams manage AWS infrastructure effectively:

1. Centralize Your Resource View

Multiple AWS console windows and dashboards create cognitive overhead and increase the chance of missing critical information. A centralized approach should include:

• Aggregating resources across accounts and regions

• Implementing consistent tagging (and enforcing it)

• Making resource relationships visible and queryable

2. Automate Everything (Seriously)

Manual configuration creates technical debt and increases operational risk. Focus your automation efforts on:

• Converting manual processes into IaC

• Automating routine maintenance tasks

• Setting up automated compliance checks

• Building self-service capabilities for developers

3. Build Developer Self-Service (The Right Way)

Developers need autonomy, but with guardrails. The key is finding the right balance:

• Create pre-approved resource templates

• Implement automated policy enforcement

• Provide clear resource ownership tracking

• Enable automated cost controls

4. Make Compliance Part of the Process

Instead of treating compliance as an afterthought, bake it into your workflows:

• Define resource standards in code

• Automate compliance checking

• Set up automated remediation

• Make compliance status visible

How We're Using Tempest for AWS Management

We've been working on Tempest to address these challenges in a way that aligns with how engineering teams actually work. Here's what makes it particularly effective:

1. It's built for engineers, by engineers - The interface provides a unified view of AWS resources without hiding the technical details you need. You can see everything from high-level service relationships to detailed configuration states.

2. It doesn't force you to change how you work - Keep using your existing IaC tools and workflows. Tempest adds a layer of visibility and control without requiring you to rebuild your infrastructure management approach from scratch.

3. It automates the boring stuff - Resource syncing, compliance checking, and state monitoring all happen automatically in the background.

4. Developer self-service that doesn't make platform teams nervous - Developers get a clean interface for requesting and managing resources, while platform teams maintain control over templates, policies, and guardrails.

Looking Forward

As AWS continues to expand (just look at all the announcements coming out of re:Invent), managing cloud resources efficiently is only going to become more critical. The teams that succeed will be the ones that find ways to automate away the complexity while maintaining control and visibility.

Whether you use Tempest or build your own cloud infrastructure management solutions, the key is to focus on:

• Centralizing resource management

• Automating routine tasks

• Enabling developer self-service

• Making compliance automatic

The goal isn't just to make cloud infrastructure management easier – it's to free up your team to focus on building and shipping code instead of wrestling with cloud infrastructure.

Want to see how we're approaching these challenges? Check out Tempest and let us know what you think.