Architecting Complete Solutions That Solve Business Problems Through Technology
Hi, I’m Blake, and I run VirtualExponent, a solutions architecture consultancy. I architect complete solutions that solve business problems through technology.
I specialize in building scalable, secure cloud infrastructure that grows with your business. With 7+ years of systems engineering experience and a focus on modern DevOps practices, I help startups and growing companies move from fragile, manual processes to robust, automated systems that can handle 10x growth without 10x the infrastructure costs.
If you would like to see how I actually build things, everything I demonstrate on this portfolio can be found in my GitHub.
My Background
I bring a unique combination of deep systems engineering experience and cutting-edge cloud expertise. My journey includes:
- Systems Engineering Foundation: 5 years managing 200+ Linux servers, reducing downtime from weekly to maybe twice a year
- Cloud Transformation: Migrated various sized companies from on-premise to AWS, cutting infrastructure costs by 30-60% while improving performance
- DevOps Evolution: Built CI/CD pipelines that took deployment times from 2 hours to 5 minutes (and made Friday deployments actually safe)
- Security Operations: Former security analyst who knows what actually matters for compliance (hint: it’s not always what auditors think)
I dedicate time outside core engineering work to diverse pursuits… empowerment coaching, video production, and small business consulting… Experiences that scale across domains and sharpen my ability to understand business needs and communicate technical solutions clearly.
What Sets VirtualExponent Apart
Real-World Experience: I’ve managed countless production upgrades where failure meant angry customers and lost revenue. Building failover workflows that actually succeed has been my motto when architecting or maintaining large-scale systems. Comprehensive testing, monitoring, and rollback strategies make all the difference. Test/hope/pray just isn’t a strategy. I practice, experiment, and verify these patterns in lab environments first, ensuring smooth integration into dev while collecting the metrics needed before rolling out to staging and production.
Business Focus: I engineered my own Terraform templates (check my GitHub) that demonstrate the bare minimum infrastructure for ASG, ECS, and EKS deployments. No bloat, just the core resources, permissions, and policies you actually need. When clients ask “what’s the simplest way to do this?” I can show them exactly - making scaling decisions clearer and cheaper than ever.
Modern Practices: You probably noticed I love Terraform. Hundreds of modules written, GitHub Actions for CI/CD, and I actually test disaster recovery plans (because nobody wants to find out their backups don’t work at 3am). I also know when a bash script beats a complex orchestration tool.
Who I Work Best With: Startups and SMBs between $1M-$50M revenue who need their infrastructure to scale but can’t afford a full DevOps team. If you’re still SSHing into servers to deploy or your AWS bill surprises you every month, we should talk.
Current Focus
AI. It’s not just speeding up my work, it’s expanding what I can confidently build. When a client needs something in a stack I haven’t touched, AI helps me get productive fast without the usual ramp-up time. It catches errors before they become problems, generates the boilerplate, and lets me focus on architecture and business logic. This means I can take on more diverse projects and deliver solutions that might have been outside my wheelhouse just a year ago.
Ready to Talk?
I typically work with 3-4 clients at a time to ensure I can dive deep into your infrastructure challenges. If you’re tired of band-aid solutions and want infrastructure that just works, let’s have a 30-minute call.
Share your biggest infrastructure headache with me, and I’ll reply with either a quick fix you can try or a time to discuss a proper solution.