Ken Barlow
I'm a software architect with 21 years of production engineering experience. I've been writing code professionally since 2004, including early career at Microsoft and ten years as Principal Engineer at a private SaaS where I cut $1.5M+ from the annual AWS bill in one fiscal year.
I'm currently CTO at Allset, where I just shipped voice AI on AWS Bedrock — sub-300ms latency, cross-account architecture, on-device STT plus swappable LLM plus OpenAI TTS.
I'm focused on production AI architecture for AWS — Bedrock cost optimization, voice AI design, multi-tenant patterns, production hardening for AI workloads. I write about it, build open-source tools for it, and consult on it.
Work With Me
I take a small number of advisory engagements for Series A-C voice and agentic AI startups whose AWS spend is climbing faster than revenue. Engagements start with a 2-week diagnostic at $4,900; larger scopes are SOW'd from there.
If you need help, I'm open to work on both consulting and advisory. More information can be found here.
Writing
- 07 May, 2026Seven AWS levers that cut $1.5M from a production SaaS bill
- 06 May, 2026Welcome
Research
First piece coming soon.
View all research →Open Source
- 07 May, 2026bedrock-cost-calculator
Notes
- 07 May, 2026AWS Enterprise Discount Program — what most engineers don't know
- 07 May, 2026Bedrock prompt caching — when it pays back
- 07 May, 2026NAT Gateway data processing — the silent line item
- 06 May, 2026What lives here
Teaching
Curated learning paths across notes, posts, and OSS, organized by topic. Structured courses launch as the underlying material gets deep enough to teach. Current paths: AWS Cost, Voice AI, Multi-Tenant, AI Security, Beginner, Intermediate Inference, Advanced Distributed Systems.
View teaching →Follow / Contact
The best way to follow my work is on X (Twitter). For DMs and longer conversation, X or LinkedIn both work.
- X: @knbrlo
- LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/knbrlo
- GitHub: github.com/knbrlo
- YouTube: @knbrlo