About Me

I'm Manuel Acosta, a Senior Cloud & Data Engineer with over 9 years of experience designing and optimizing scalable, data-driven cloud architectures on AWS and GCP.

My work sits at the intersection of infrastructure and data: I build the pipelines, platforms, and architectures that let engineering and analytics teams move fast without breaking things. I specialize in reducing cloud costs without sacrificing performance, modernizing legacy data workflows into event-driven systems, and leading technical teams through complex migrations.

Currently I serve as Infrastructure & Data Tech Lead at Crabi, where I lead the infrastructure and data engineering roadmap for the core platform. In parallel, I work as a freelance Data Lake & Cloud Engineer in the HealthTech space, where I've cut Aurora RDS costs by 73% — from ~$7,000 to ~$1,900/month — through storage migration, instance class optimization, and a zero-downtime PostgreSQL v13 → v17 upgrade via AWS Blue/Green deployment.

AWS Certifications

AWS Certified Machine Learning Engineer – Associate badge

AWS Certified Machine Learning Engineer

Associate

AWS Certified Data Engineer – Associate badge

AWS Certified Data Engineer

Associate

AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate badge

AWS Certified Solutions Architect

Associate

Skills & Expertise

  • Cloud Architecture (AWS & GCP)

    Designing multi-account AWS organizations, serverless architectures with Lambda & API Gateway, Kubernetes on EKS, and CDK/Terraform infrastructure as code.

  • Data Engineering

    Building and modernizing data pipelines with AWS Glue, Step Functions, and CDC patterns. Migrating from full-load to incremental processing to reduce compute time, storage costs, and data latency.

  • Cloud Cost Optimization

    Identifying and eliminating cloud waste through storage class migration, right-sizing, query tuning (Aurora PostgreSQL), and architectural refactoring. Delivered $61K+/year in savings for clients.

  • DevOps & CI/CD

    Designing automated deployment pipelines using GitHub Actions, AWS CodePipeline, and the Serverless Framework. Containerized microservices in Go and Python with hexagonal architecture patterns.

  • Data Warehousing & Analytics

    Building gold-layer data warehouses with AWS Glue ETL, Amazon Redshift, and QuickSight for BI and embedded analytics. Experience with multi-source EMR systems and KPI reporting at scale.

  • Observability & Reliability

    Monitoring, alerting, and incident response with Grafana, Prometheus, and Loki. Established RCA frameworks and data engineering policy workflows to raise reliability standards.

My Journey

I started my career as a back-end developer at Alana, where I spent 4+ years building PHP and Node.js services — including a serverless migration from a monolithic Symfony stack to AWS Lambda, and a payroll calculation system covering Mexican and Colombian labor laws. That's where I fell in love with infrastructure: I kept wanting to go deeper into the platform powering the code.

I joined Crabi in 2021 as a Cloud Engineer, migrating a Kubernetes cluster from Google Cloud Platform to AWS EKS and building the CI/CD foundations for a growing microservices platform. In 2024 I stepped into the Infrastructure & Data Tech Lead role, leading both the infrastructure roadmap and the data engineering team — aligning technical direction with product, data, and operations goals across the organization.

In parallel, I've been doing freelance data engineering in HealthTech, where the work has been deeply cost-focused: migrating Aurora storage types, right-sizing database instances, executing zero-downtime major version upgrades, and cleaning up years of orphaned snapshot data. That project alone has saved ~$61K/year in recurring infrastructure spend.

SelfTaughtCloud is where I document what I learn along the way — the real problems, the decisions that worked, and the ones that didn't.

Let's Work Together

I'm available for cloud consulting, data engineering contracts, and technical advisory. If you're dealing with runaway cloud costs, a data pipeline that needs modernizing, or an infrastructure migration — let's talk.

Contact Me