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Built by engineers
who've broken things at scale

CloudScale Consulting exists because the hardest infrastructure problems don't have clean answers — and the people giving advice usually haven't lived through the failure modes they're theorising about.

CloudScale Consulting
cloudscale.consulting Sponsored by andrewbaker.ninja
Who we are

Hard opinions. Real scale. No fluff.

CloudScale Consulting is a specialist technology consultancy focused on four disciplines: AWS architecture, cybersecurity, Zero Trust network access, and rearchitecting large-scale technology platforms. The practice is led by Andrew Baker and backed by 20+ years of engineering leadership at AWS, Capitec Bank, and ABSA Group.

We don't advise from the outside. Every recommendation is grounded in having operated these systems at the highest level — from scaling EC2 at AWS to leading technology transformation across Africa's largest banks. We publish our thinking at andrewbaker.ninja, and we open-source the tools we use in production.

The audience for everything we do — blog, plugins, and consulting — is engineers, CTOs, and infrastructure leads who need opinions from someone who has actually broken the systems they're discussing, not someone who has read about them.

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Leadership

Andrew Baker

Andrew Baker is a technology executive with 20+ years building and operating large-scale infrastructure across financial services, cloud computing, and banking technology on three continents.

As Group CIO at Capitec Bank, he leads technology strategy for South Africa's leading digital bank — 22 million clients, millions of daily transactions, and the regulatory scrutiny that comes with it.

Before Capitec, he was Director of Engineering for EC2 at AWS — the foundational compute platform powering the internet. Not a consultant advising on AWS. Someone who helped scale the platform itself.

His career has also included CTO at ABSA Group (pan-African banking technology transformation) and algorithmic trading systems at Barclays Capital — where low-latency infrastructure failures have immediate, measurable consequences.

𝕏 @andrewbaker007 in LinkedIn gh GitHub
Career timeline
Group CIO
Capitec Bank — South Africa
Technology leadership for South Africa's leading digital bank. 22M+ clients, full regulatory stack, digital-first banking infrastructure at national scale.
Chief Technology Officer
ABSA Group — Pan-Africa
Led pan-African banking technology transformation across 12 countries. Core banking modernisation, digital channels, and cloud migration at continental scale.
Director of Engineering, EC2
Amazon Web Services
Scaled EC2 — the foundational compute platform powering AWS — globally. Built and led engineering teams responsible for the infrastructure millions of companies depend on.
Algorithmic Trading Systems
Barclays Capital
Low-latency trading system infrastructure where microseconds matter. Infrastructure failure has immediate financial consequences — the best possible stress test.
Content & expertise

Six content pillars

andrewbaker.ninja covers the six domains where CloudScale has genuine operational experience — not curated content, not recycled takes.

01

Engineering Leadership & Culture

Building technical organisations that ship — hiring, structure, culture, and the management patterns that actually work at scale.

02

AWS, Cloud & Database Architecture

Infrastructure decisions that survive contact with production. EC2, Aurora, S3, Lambda, and the performance cliffs most architectures hit silently.

03

Networking & Infrastructure

BGP, DNS, TLS, Cloudflare, ZTNA — the networking fundamentals that don't make it onto cloud certification syllabuses but break production anyway.

04

Open Source & Developer Tooling

Five free WordPress plugins. Security frameworks. The philosophy: if it works in our production, we open-source it. No upsells, no premium tiers.

05

Banking Technology & Cyber Security

The specific security and compliance constraints of regulated financial services. POPIA, GDPR, PCI DSS, and the threat models banks actually face.

06

Artificial Intelligence

Practical AI integration with Claude and Gemini — in production, on your server, with your data going to the provider API, not through a middleman.

233+
Technical posts published
5+
Free WordPress plugins
3+
Continents of experience
20yr
Engineering leadership
Get in touch

Want to work together?

Cloud architecture, security, ZTNA, database design, or AI integration — reach out directly. No gatekeeping, no sales process.

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