Manu
Muraleedharan
Architecture for systems that have to
actually stay up.
the industry
Builder
AWS · Azure · GCP
Architecture as a long game
Enterprise applications, cloud platforms, and data-driven systems — one continuous thread from Oracle suites to serverless.
Manu is a seasoned software professional with over 20 years of experience in the tech industry, spanning enterprise applications, cloud solutions, and data-driven platforms. As an AWS Community Builder for four years and a holder of multiple AWS certifications, he brings deep expertise in designing scalable, cloud-native architectures.
A passionate advocate for AI, data, and automation, Manu focuses on the practical application of emerging technologies — the version that survives a production incident, an audit, and a budget review, not the version that only demos well.
That work has been done at scale for organisations including Apple, Target and Sony: migrations out of the data centre, observability platforms measured in millions of metrics, developer platforms for greenfield cities, and ETL pipelines feeding machine learning models. Today he designs serverless-first architecture at Serverless Guru and consults on cloud, DevOps and AI.
At a glance
What I'm brought in to do
Independent consulting across three connected areas. Most engagements start with an architecture review and end with a team that can run it themselves.
Architecture & migration
Getting workloads out of the data centre and into a design that holds up — landing zones, resilience, cost, and the serverless-first rewrite where it pays off.
- Migration & modernization strategy
- Serverless and event-driven design
- Disaster recovery & resilience
- Well-Architected reviews
Platform & delivery
The paved road: pipelines, infrastructure as code, and the observability that tells you the truth at 3am instead of a dashboard nobody reads.
- CI/CD and GitOps pipelines
- Kubernetes & container platforms
- Internal developer platforms
- Monitoring, SRE & incident readiness
Pipelines & automation
Data plumbing that machine learning can actually stand on — streaming ingestion, governed lakes, and models put to work on real operational problems.
- Streaming & batch ETL architecture
- ML pipelines on SageMaker
- Anomaly & fraud detection design
- Intelligent automation
Twenty-plus years, in order
Selected engagements from each role. Clients are named where the work is public.
Cloud Solution Architect
Designing AWS-native, serverless architecture for client platforms, and advising engineering teams on cloud solutions, DevOps practice and applied AI.
Product Architect
Offshore technical architect leading implementation of an AWS environment and disaster recovery for applications moving off the data centre.
Solution architecture for an ETL pipeline and AI system detecting malicious activity across enterprise security data at scale using SageMaker.
Senior Data Engineer
Platform architect for GRID, MAF's central data platform spanning retail, fintech, lifestyle, and entertainment verticals. Responsible for pipeline governance, alerting strategy, and developer tooling across all domains.
Earlier roles
Fifteen years of delivery across enterprise application migration, data centre modernization, observability platforms, ETL pipelines for machine learning, and developer platform work for greenfield cities.
Tools of the trade
The stack that gets used in real production environments — not the version assembled for a conference slide.
- AWS (primary)
- Microsoft Azure
- Google Cloud
- Lambda & serverless
- API Gateway
- CloudFront / CDN
- Databricks
- Apache Spark
- SageMaker
- Redshift / BigQuery
- Glue / ADF
- Delta Lake / Iceberg
- Terraform / IaC
- Kubernetes / EKS
- Docker
- GitHub Actions
- Jenkins
- Datadog / CloudWatch
- Python
- Node.js / TypeScript
- SQL
- Bash / Shell
- Java
- YAML / HCL
- DynamoDB
- RDS / Aurora
- S3
- ADLS Gen2
- Redis
- Elasticsearch
- Event-driven
- Serverless-first
- Domain-driven design
- Well-Architected
- GitOps
- SRE / observability
Certifications & education
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AWS Certified DevOps Engineer — ProfessionalAmazon Web Services
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AWS Certified Solutions Architect — ProfessionalAmazon Web Services
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AWS Certified Solutions Architect — AssociateAmazon Web Services
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AWS Certified CloudOps Engineer — AssociateAmazon Web Services
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Google Cloud Certified Professional Cloud ArchitectGoogle Cloud
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Microsoft Certified: Azure Administrator AssociateMicrosoft
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AWS Community BuilderFour consecutive years
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Master of Computer ApplicationsUniversity of Kerala · 2004
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BSc Computer ScienceUniversity of Kerala · 2000
Outside the cloud, Manu bakes. Cakes, from a home kitchen — which turns out to be the same discipline as architecture: measure properly, respect the sequence, and don't open the oven early.
On the record
Conference talks, community sessions, and written work on cloud architecture and data engineering.
Start a conversation
If you're thinking about a cloud migration, a platform rebuild, or a data architecture that needs to actually work — let's talk.
What to expect
I take on a small number of consulting engagements at a time — enough to give each client the attention the work deserves. If you're not in a hurry, put a line in your message about what you're working on and the general timeframe.
I'm based in Bengaluru (UTC +05:30) but work globally, async-first. Most engagements begin with a 30-minute architecture call.