From One to Hundreds: Reflections on a Decade of Building the Trenches
Joel Thompson
fwd:cloudsec Europe 2025 · Day 1 · Main Room
Joel Thompson, co-founder of fwd:cloudsec, delivered a deeply practical retrospective on scaling an AWS footprint from a single test account to hundreds of production accounts over the course of a decade. Drawing from his experience as a "secure builder" — someone who always prioritized security without having it in his official job title — Thompson shared hard-won lessons about declarative inventory management, infrastructure-as-code tooling, CI/CD patterns for account provisioning, and account-level security patterns including DNS delegation and **VPC endpoint policies**. The talk is a rare look at the operational reality of enterprise AWS governance from someone who both built the platform and consumed it.
AI review
A well-structured operational retrospective on scaling AWS account governance from one to hundreds over a decade. Thompson delivers practical, experience-backed guidance on declarative inventory management, DNS delegation, and VPC endpoint policies. The content is sound and useful for anyone running a large AWS estate, but lacks novel vulnerability research, offensive techniques, or measurable security outcomes that would elevate it beyond solid operational advice.