How can I moonlight as an infrastructure contractor?

Question

Background: - BS in CS with an emphasis in compiler/language theory from a decent school. - 5 years experience doing a mix of light dev, heavy ops.I have mostly dealt with rebuilding/refactoring/optimizing large. distributed on-cloud kubernetes based platforms from the ground up. I have a wide variety of cloud experience, but am most proficient at AWS/terraform, and can program well enough that I have patched buggy providersand taken a stab at writing my own. I have spearheaded several company-wide initiatives and projects on my own and have some light project management experience. I have a smidge of SRE experience on a very large ecommerce website.My question is - how can I leverage this experience into being a solo contractor? I don't have the faintest clue other than I know I can do it, because my last few jobs have been based on rebuilding/refactoring the last mess that the contractor they tried to hire before me did, and I see the quality of work that's accepted.I have no idea what to charge, where to market, how to sell myself and my services. How can I begin? With inflation, my retirement plans are starting to fall apart and I want a second income without a second employer.

NtochkaNzvanova · Accepted Answer

There have been a lot of "how do I become a contractor/consultant" threads on HN in the past. Most of the advice isn't specific to infra, so searching for those will be a good starting point.
To summarize: the best way to get started is always within your network. Reach out to people you know who might need your services, and ask them if they do. If those work out, they'll refer you to other people they know. If things go well, you'll be able to keep yourself busy through word of mouth and never have to advertise.
There's a lot of debate over whether to charge by the hour, the day, the week, or by project. If you're just dipping your toes in the water, it doesn't hurt to start with hourly, because it's low risk for both parties involved. Here's a heuristic: start with the hourly rate you're making at your current full-time gig, and double it. That accounts for the fact there's overhead in contracting that you don't see in a full-time job (insurance, employment taxes, etc.), and also for the fact that you may not be able to keep yourself employed full time initially, so it gives you some wiggle room.
If your first client doesn't balk at the rate, increase it by 10-25% for the next client, and repeat. Stop when people freak out at your price or you're retired, whichever comes first.