CloudValet is Duke and David. We met at a FAANG company, we came from AWS, Microsoft and Expedia, and we build one tool that does two things properly.
Co-founder / infrastructure
FAANG · AWS
Spent years on the provider side of the bill, then years on the paying side of it at FAANG scale. Knows exactly which resources can be stopped safely and which ones bite back.
Reads pricing changelogs for fun. Genuinely.
Co-founder / access and product
FAANG · Microsoft · Expedia
Built and reviewed access models on estates where a single wildcard policy could reach production. Writes the plain-English translations CloudValet gives you.
Believes no one should need a lawyer to read a policy document.
Duke and David are the names we go by here. Full names and photos land with the public launch.
The night that started it
A team spun up a fleet to load test a release on a Thursday. The release went out. The fleet stayed. Nobody looked again until the following month, when finance asked why one cost centre had jumped by five figures.
It took Duke twenty minutes to find and kill. That is the part that still annoys us. Twenty minutes of work, four weeks late, because nothing in the account had an opinion about idle machines at 3 a.m.
The IAM half came from the same estate. Fixing it meant reading a policy so nested that three engineers disagreed about what it actually allowed. Not a hard question. Just written in a language humans do not read well.
So: park what nobody is using, and say plainly who can do what. That is the whole company. We are not adding a tenth module.
Your engineers clock off at six. Your dev environment keeps the meter running until they clock back on. We think that is a solvable problem, and we think about it more than is normal.
Duke & David
