Advice from someone who has broken these systems at scale.
CloudScale Consulting is a cyber security and AI / SEO specialist practice. It exists because the hardest security and search problems do not have clean answers, and the people giving advice have usually not lived through the failure modes they are theorising about.
Two specialisms sit at the centre. Cyber security: AI-powered penetration testing, threat modelling, incident response, Zero Trust network access and banking-grade architecture. AI-powered SEO and AEO: technical audits, metadata at scale, and getting cited by ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews. Around those sit AWS architecture, platform rearchitecting, ECM, and full-stack web, WordPress and ecommerce development.
The audience for all of it (the blog, the plugins and the consulting) is engineers, CTOs and infrastructure leads who want an opinion from someone who has actually broken the system being discussed.
Andrew Baker
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: 26 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.
- LinkedIn100k+ followers
- GitHubandrewbakercloudscale
Long-form thinking is published at andrewbaker.ninja.
Roles held, not clients advised.
- 01
Group CIO
Capitec Bank · South Africa
Technology leadership for South Africa's leading digital bank. 26M+ clients, the full regulatory stack, and digital-first banking infrastructure at national scale.
- 02
Director of Engineering, EC2
Amazon Web Services
Scaled EC2, the foundational compute platform powering AWS, globally. Built and led the engineering teams responsible for infrastructure millions of companies depend on.
- 03
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.
- 04
Algorithmic Trading Systems
Barclays Capital
Low-latency trading infrastructure where microseconds matter and failure has immediate financial consequences, the best possible stress test.
Six domains with genuine operational experience behind them.
These are what andrewbaker.ninja covers, not curated content, not recycled takes. Every one links through to the writing.
- 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 and ZTNA, the fundamentals that don't appear on cloud certification syllabuses but break production anyway.
- 04
Open Source & Developer Tooling
Five WordPress plugins and 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 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 rather than through a middleman.
Want to work together?
Cloud architecture, security, ZTNA, database design, AI integration, or your next web or ecommerce build. Reach out directly, no gatekeeping, no sales process.