About
I’m Chris Portela. I founded 0xA (pronounced “oh ex ay”) in 2019 as a one-man software consulting practice.
I focus on helping teams get control of their cloud infrastructure: setting it up properly, documenting it as code, securing it, and teaching best practices for AWS and GCP. Because implementing infrastructure best practices almost always touches application code, this frequently includes software development work too: integrating with cloud services, improving deployment pipelines, debugging performance issues, and modernizing systems.
A big part of what I do is managing the complexity that comes with taking security seriously. Good security makes cloud infrastructure significantly more complex, and my job is to abstract that complexity so it protects your business without slowing down your developers.
Background
0xA grew out of work I was already doing at companies I worked at and advised. The same problems kept coming up: teams that lacked the time or specialized experience to properly configure and manage their cloud resources, even when they had strong engineers.
I’ve been a technical lead on microservice migrations that replaced legacy systems, worked on infrastructure and networking at major tech companies, and have deep experience across the stack: Python/Django, React, Rust, Go, AWS, GCP, and the surrounding ecosystem of tools. I’ve helped clients cut significant cloud costs, debug race conditions that stumped their teams, and build infrastructure their engineers could actually maintain after I left.
Get in Touch
My services page describes how I work and what I charge.
If you’re not sure whether I can help with your situation, just reach out. The initial conversation is free and I’ll give you an honest answer.