I’m Cory Francis, an engineering leader and independent consultant in Seattle. I spent nearly a decade building and running infrastructure, cloud operations, and SRE teams, most recently as Director of Developer Operations at A Place for Mom, where I led a global team of eight SREs across three countries and served as the primary technology advisor to senior leadership.

Some of the work I’m proud of from that time:

  • Drove a legacy monolith into more than 100 containerized microservices on AWS
  • Scaled production deployments from once every two weeks to more than 100 per week
  • Owned a $250K per month cloud budget and cut $110K per year in redundant SaaS spend
  • Unified CI/CD from Jenkins, Ansible, and TeamCity onto a single GitHub Actions platform

Before that I managed Windows infrastructure at Expeditors International, thousands of servers across 350+ offices in 100+ countries, where I was the resident PowerShell subject matter expert.

What I’m doing now

Leadership pulled me away from the keyboard for a long time. Consulting is how I’m getting back in touch with my roots: building open source tools, running cloud migrations, and doing hands-on work for Pacific Northwest organizations that need things to actually work rather than just look good in a slide deck.

I’m open to engineering leadership and senior platform roles. If you’re hiring, or you have a problem worth solving, get in touch.

What I work with

  • AWS: ECS Fargate, EKS, Lambda, RDS, and most things in between
  • Azure / M365: Entra ID, SharePoint Online, Intune, Static Web Apps
  • IaC / CI/CD: Terraform, GitHub Actions, Azure Pipelines
  • Languages: PowerShell, Python, Node.js, C# / .NET
  • Observability: Datadog, New Relic, Splunk

This site

I write about things I build or break. Posts are technical and direct. No marketing copy, no “synergy.” If you found something useful here, that’s the goal.