In this episode, Sunny Ray sits down with Khaled, co-founder and lead developer at CloudBest, an AWS advanced tier consulting partner based in Jordan, and co-founder of ArcMate, an AI powered cloud architecture validation platform. Khaled traces his path from a childhood spent tinkering with early computers in Jordan through a computer science degree, consulting work with Novo Nordisk in Denmark, and years building startups including a legal contract company and homie to trend in London. He explains how becoming a CloudBest client himself, and questioning whether his infrastructure security was actually correct, led him to co-found ArcMate with Masam and Ramy. The conversation covers ArcMate's automated checks across AWS well architected pillars, compliance frameworks, and FinOps cost optimization, plus a live demo of anomaly detection and savings recommendations. Khaled also discusses AWS's new autonomous DevOps agents, lessons from failed products, his management philosophy, and advice for founders building on the cloud from day one. The episode closes with details on how to try ArcMate and connect with CloudBest.
A Jordan-based cloud founder explains how AI agents now audit, secure, and even chat with your entire cloud infrastructure.
Can you give us the high level on ArcMate and what you're building?
ArcMate checks if your infrastructure has been built following AWS best practices across six pillars including security, operational excellence, reliability, and cost optimization, all in minutes. We also check compliance against 15 plus frameworks like PCI DSS and ISO 27001, help with FinOps and cost optimization, and now you can literally talk with your own infrastructure using our AI.
Take us back to growing up in Jordan. What kind of kid were you and when did computers first grab you?
There was a device called Sakhr, basically a keyboard that contained Visual Basic, and that was the start. I kept programming through school because I liked problem solving and thinking things through. I studied computer science at university, built multiple applications, then worked across web, full stack, startups, and even manufacturing to see the business from different perspectives.
What was your first real coding job and what did that team teach you about shipping product?
It was at a company called Excellence Through Quality, doing document writing and workflow engines. I worked as an external consultant with Novo Nordisk in Denmark, splitting time onsite and in Jordan, coordinating with separate vendors for development, QA, and business intelligence. That taught me how international companies actually operate in the IT sector.
What's the funny story about how you ended up co-founding ArcMate?
I was actually a client of CloudBest. I was co-founder of a digital contract startup and built my infrastructure on AWS, but I needed to be sure it followed security best practices, so CloudBest built the security for me. Talking with the founder, an ex-Amazon engineer named Masam, I realized there was no way to verify if it was done correctly, and that gap became ArcMate.
You built Adele, an AI legal assistant for Jordanian law at ACTI. What did that teach you about AI in a regulated domain?
We digitized contracts and made them legally binding through a government gateway, but the real hook was Adele acting as a balanced assistant, not favoring either side. Clients could ask if they could exit a lease and Adele would check the terms against actual Jordanian law to tell them if it was valid. That took the product to another level.
AWS launched frontier agents for autonomous DevOps and security. Why does that matter so much to you?
When you get an error, say in ECS or tied back to an RDS database, the DevOps agent checks everything up and down, all the logs, and gives you the exact result of what's going on. We're also building observability with the right recommendations and reasoning behind errors. It massively reduces time from a tech, product, and business perspective.
You say 30 percent of AWS spend is waste. Where is that waste hiding?
It's things like right sizing, for example an unused OpenVPN instance still provisioned that you could downsize based on actual utilization, migrating to Graviton, or committing to reserved instances and savings plans once usage is validated. ArcMate breaks it into phases: right size first, fix architecture, monitor for seven days, then commit to save real money.
If a founder is starting a company today and running on the cloud, what's the one thing to get right from day one?
The right team, the right partners, market fit, and commitment, you need to work at it constantly and think outside the box. Specifically on the cloud, keep it simple at first, don't overcomplicate things, validate your MVP has value, then use tools like Amplify, ECS, or serverless Lambda with an event driven approach once you're ready to scale.
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