What do companies with internal platforms have to change to succeed in the cloud? The five pillars at the heart of IT solutions in the cloud are automation, fault tolerance, horizontal scalability, security, and cost-effectiveness. This talk discusses tools that facilitate the development and automate the deployment of secure, highly available microservices. The tools were developed using AWS CloudFormation, AWS SDKs, AWS CLI, Amazon RDS, and various open-source software such as Docker. The talk provides concrete examples of how these tools can help developers and architects move from beginning/intermediate AWS practitioners to cloud deployment experts.