Case Study: Multi-Cloud Automation Platform Engineering

Company: Logicworks, acquired by RapidScale (a Cox Communications company) | Role: Director of Engineering

Domain: Cloud Management Platform (CMP) / DevOps Automation

The Challenge

Logicworks (acquired by RapidScale), a premier cloud managed service provider, needed to scale its proprietary "Cloud Automation Platform" to support a growing enterprise client base. The existing system was AWS-centric, limiting the Total Addressable Market (TAM), and required manual steps during client implementations & support processes that threatened to linearly increase operational costs as the client base grew.

Strategic Goals:

  • Expand Addressable Market: Enable full support for Microsoft Azure automation to match existing AWS automation.

  • Scalability Without Linear Operational Cost Increases: Support 200+ enterprise clients without a proportional increase in engineering or support headcount.

  • Automate Regulatory Compliance: Automate governance ("Guardrails") to win more clients in regulated industries like Healthcare and Finance.

The Solution

I directed the cloud architecture & platform engineering teams in building and refining a centralized Cloud Automation Platform. This system acted as a "governance engine," integrating a multi-tenant CMDB with client-specific Terraform / JSON repositories to enforce infrastructure-as-code standards.

Key Engineering Initiatives:

  • Market Expansion to Azure: Led architectural pivot to a true multi-cloud (AWS + Azure) cloud automation platform. This involved managing the refactoring of existing AWS / Python Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) automation to Azure / C#.

  • Automated "Guardrails": Developed a suite of automated compliance checks that enforced best practices across four critical pillars:

    • Monitoring: Automated configurations and automated rollout of AWS CloudWatch and Azure Monitor best-practices.

    • Resiliency: Enforced cross-region backups (AWS Backups / Azure Backup).

    • Security: Automated deployment & configuration of security agents on VMs.

    • FinOps: Data pipeline to cost optimization platform for optimal use of Reserved Instances and Savings Plans.

Integration & M&A Success

Following the strategic acquisition of Logicworks by RapidScale (Cox Communications), I led engineering efforts to unify the Logicworks platform with the RapidScale Portal.

  • Unified UX: Delivered a seamless client-facing experience that visualized public cloud configuration options (client interaction via UX instead of Terraform or JSON).

  • Value Demonstration: Data pipeline and visualizations for "prevented risk", "cloud cost savings", resiliency & security metrics, increasing the portal’s engagement to public cloud clients and facilitating cross-sell opportunities.

Business Impact

  • Scalability: Scaled the platform to support 200+ enterprise clients with minimal increases in operational staffing (OpEx).

  • Azure: Doubled company’s addressable market - Azure client growth outpaced AWS annually since launch.

  • Strategic Client Revenue Growth: The "Guardrails" product became a key differentiator, directly instrumental in closing deals with high-compliance strategic enterprise customers in Healthcare, Finance, Insurance, and other regulated industries.