MAKAO Labs helps scaling African startups cut cloud waste, build reliable infrastructure, and adopt AI safely — without sending your data outside your own environment.
Idle resources, oversized instances, orphaned storage, and no visibility into what's driving spend. The bill grows — the value doesn't.
You want to adopt AI but your data is messy, PII is everywhere, and compliance questions don't have answers. AI on a bad foundation amplifies problems.
Government and enterprise clients want audit trails, data residency, and uptime guarantees. Infrastructure immaturity becomes a credibility problem.
Structured, fixed-scope engagements with clear deliverables. Priced after we understand your environment. No surprises.
A deep analysis of your AWS spend delivered in 5 business days. Read-only access only. Most clients identify 15–35% in savings within the first 30 days.
Get a Quote →Architecture design, security posture, scalability, reliability — evaluated against the maturity level your enterprise clients expect.
Ship faster. Break less. Scale confidently. From zero DevOps to live DORA measurement — we meet you where you are.
PII mapping, compliance posture, and AI use case feasibility — with a Zero-Trust adoption roadmap that keeps data inside your cloud.
Ongoing implementation support, quarterly architecture reviews, and async access — for teams who want to act on their roadmap without hiring full-time.
A lightweight container that deploys inside your AWS account and runs continuously — surfacing cost waste, security gaps, and compliance drift. No raw data leaves your environment.
Most AI tools require sending your data to external APIs. For startups serving enterprise and government clients across Africa, this creates compliance risk, regulatory exposure, and client trust problems.
MAKAO Labs' Zero-Trust architecture runs AI analysis entirely inside your own cloud environment. Raw logs, customer data, credentials, and PII never leave your infrastructure.
This is the architecture that unlocks AI adoption for clients who need it most — and can't afford to get it wrong.
30 minutes. We understand your stack and pain points. No jargon, no pitch.
We send you exact IAM policy JSON. One read-only role. We cannot modify anything.
We do the analysis. Your team works. No meetings during the assessment period.
Full report with every finding and a clear 30–90 day actionable roadmap.
Delivered by AWS-certified SMEs with hands-on production experience from inside the industry. Every recommendation is grounded in what actually works.
We understand compliance landscapes, connectivity constraints, and the trust requirements of government clients across Africa.
We will never recommend AI that sends your client data to external APIs. Every AI recommendation keeps data inside your cloud.
Every finding is framed in terms of runway, reliability, and scale — not just technical metrics. We speak to CTOs and founders.
No reseller relationships with AWS or any vendor. Our recommendations are based solely on what is right for your environment and budget.
Reports, roadmaps, and findings are yours to keep. No lock-in. Implement independently or continue with us — your choice.
Because we work with AWS-certified SMEs, we apply the latest techniques — not just the basics every consultant knows.
Most teams tag resources but never build hierarchical cost structures. AWS Cost Categories let you map spend by business unit, environment, and team simultaneously.
Backup data sitting in S3 Standard is one of the most common silent cost drivers we find in audits. AWS Backup tiering automatically moves cold data to cheaper storage.
AI token costs shock most startups after launch. Bedrock prompt caching reuses computation for repeated context — this is the architecture decision that separates a $300 AI bill from a $3,000 one.
This is what AWS insider knowledge looks like in practice. Every MAKAO Labs engagement applies the latest cost optimisation techniques published by AWS — not just the standard Trusted Advisor checklist.
Never. All MAKAO Labs audits and assessments use read-only IAM credentials. We send you the exact policy JSON to create a read-only role — we cannot modify, delete, create, or touch any resources. You can revoke access at any time.
All findings and report data are yours alone. We do not store, share, or use client infrastructure data for any purpose other than your engagement. Reports are delivered directly to you and we purge any access credentials immediately after delivery.
Trusted Advisor gives you a list of automated checks. MAKAO Labs gives you a business-framed analysis of what those findings mean for your runway, your clients, and your roadmap — with a prioritised action plan and human context. We also go deeper in areas Trusted Advisor doesn't cover.
Currently we specialise exclusively in AWS. This focus means deeper expertise and better findings than a generalist approach. If you are multi-cloud, we can audit your AWS environment and flag cross-cloud cost and governance implications.
The best time to fix infrastructure governance is before the bill gets large. Small environments with bad habits become expensive environments with expensive habits. If your monthly AWS spend is under $500, we'll tell you honestly whether an audit makes financial sense right now.
The Cost Audit takes 5 business days and requires only a read-only IAM role. Full assessments take 7 business days. DevOps Foundation engagements run 2-3 weeks. Enablement runs 3-4 weeks. We are designed to be low-friction — your team should not need to attend meetings or prepare materials.
This is more common than you think, and it's the perfect time to build it right. We start with a 30-minute discovery call to understand how your team currently deploys. From there we propose a Foundation engagement — typically 2-3 weeks — that sets up your CI/CD pipeline, environment structure, monitoring, and deployment runbooks.
Foundation is for teams with no DevOps setup — we build everything from scratch. Enablement is for teams who have something fragile — we fix pipelines, implement GitOps, add deployment safety, and set up proper observability. Maturity is for orgs that want to measure and improve — we set up DevLake for live DORA dashboards, Developer Experience evaluation, and quarterly reviews.
Yes to all three. We work with whatever CI/CD tooling your team already uses. For greenfield setups we typically recommend GitHub Actions for simplicity or AWS CodePipeline if you're deeply AWS-native. For GitOps we work with ArgoCD and Flux. We don't impose a stack — we recommend based on your context.
Yes — and this is one of the most valuable things we do for mature engineering teams. We set up DevLake to pull data automatically from your GitHub, Jira, and incident tools and display live DORA dashboards. You stop guessing how good your engineering is and start measuring it.
We always work with what you have first. Replacing tools is expensive, disruptive, and usually unnecessary. We only recommend new tooling when what you have genuinely can't scale — and when we do, we implement it alongside your team so knowledge transfers.
5 business days. Read-only access only. Most clients identify more in savings than the engagement costs — in the first month.