Cloud Infrastructure & DevOps
Infrastructure you can deploy to daily and explain to an auditor.
Environments defined in Terraform, with pipelines that deploy without drama and monitoring somebody reads. The bill usually goes down too. Some clients are moving out of a data centre. Most are tidying up years of console clicks.
What you end up with
- Deploy several times a day, and stop treating each release as an event
- Cut cloud spend by switching off waste and right-sizing what is left
- Recover from a failure in minutes, with a runbook that has been tested and a rollback that works
- Pass the security questionnaire and the audit without slowing releases down
Most projects start with a fixed-price discovery, so you have a scoped plan and an estimate in hand before you commit to a build.
Overview
How a cloud estate gets expensive and fragile
Most cloud estates grow one favour at a time. Someone builds an environment by hand to hit a deadline, and someone else grants a wide permission to make an integration work and means to tighten it later. There is a server nobody remembers starting, and it is still running. A few years of that and nobody can rebuild the estate or explain the bill, and every deployment happens with the whole team watching.
We treat infrastructure the way we treat application code. Everything lives in Terraform and changes go through pull requests. Environments are identical and can be thrown away and rebuilt. Pipelines run the tests and deploy blue/green or canary, and monitoring tells you something is wrong before a customer phones. We only reach for Kubernetes when the workload needs it, which is less often than people think, and we design for the bill from day one.
What's included
The kinds of work this covers.
- 01
Infrastructure as code
Terraform modules for AWS, Azure and Google Cloud. Every change is reviewed, drift is detected, and dev, staging and production can be rebuilt from the repository.
- 02
CI/CD and release engineering
GitHub Actions or GitLab pipelines that run the tests, spin up a preview environment per pull request, deploy behind feature flags or as blue/green and canary releases, and roll back in about a minute.
- 03
Cloud migration
Moving out of an on-premises rack or an old hosting provider, with an assessment, a phased plan, parallel running and rehearsed cut-overs, so the switch happens in working hours rather than over a lost weekend.
- 04
Observability and on-call readiness
Metrics, logs and traces through OpenTelemetry and Grafana, alerts tuned so people stop muting them, SLOs, and runbooks written for whoever is on call at 3am.
- 05
Security baseline and compliance
Least-privilege IAM, network segmentation, secrets management, encryption, vulnerability scanning and audit logging. SOC 2, ISO 27001 and Cyber Essentials Plus all ask about these, and having them in place makes the audit a shorter conversation.
- 06
Cost optimisation
Tagging and cost allocation so you can see who is spending what, right-sizing, reserved and spot capacity, storage lifecycle policies, and architectural changes where the waste is built into the design. We make the changes ourselves instead of leaving them in a report.
Is it right for you?
A good fit if
- Deployments are done by hand and everyone dreads them
- The cloud bill keeps growing and nobody can say why
- You are leaving a data centre, or a hosting provider that is on its way out
- An auditor, a customer or your insurer has sent a security questionnaire
- Your engineers spend more of the week on infrastructure than on the product
How we approach it
The steps between a first call and go-live.
Assessment
One to three weeks going through your architecture, accounts, pipelines, monitoring and spend. You get a report ranking the quick wins and the risks, and a roadmap in phases with an estimate for each.
Foundations
Account structure, networking, identity and the Terraform baseline first. Then CI/CD, environments and monitoring, so every later change is automated and visible to the whole team.
Migrate or modernise in phases
Workloads move one at a time, running in parallel for a while before they cut over on a rehearsed plan. Each phase leaves the estate more consistent and a bit cheaper.
Operate and hand over
Runbooks, on-call arrangements and cost reviews. Then either a monthly retainer or a full hand-over to your own team, with documentation written so either works.
Deliverables
What you'll have at the end.
- Infrastructure and cost assessment with a ranked roadmap
- Terraform for every environment, in a repository you own
- CI/CD pipelines with preview environments and blue/green or canary deploys
- Dashboards, alerts and SLOs on an observability stack you can run yourselves
- Security baseline documentation and the evidence an auditor will ask for
- Runbooks, on-call notes and monthly cost reporting
Typical stack
The tools we tend to use for this.
- AWS
- Azure
- Google Cloud
- Terraform
- Docker
- Kubernetes
- GitHub Actions
- Grafana / OpenTelemetry
- Sentry
- PostgreSQL
- Go
Related work
Projects that used this service.
Questions
Questions about this service.
Which cloud provider do you recommend?
AWS for most workloads. Azure if the organisation already lives in Microsoft tools, and Google Cloud for data-heavy platforms. In practice it mostly comes down to what you already run and who you employ, plus any commercial agreements you have signed. Feature comparisons come a long way behind. We will say so if it is not the answer you were hoping for.
Do we need Kubernetes?
Probably not. Managed services, containers on ECS or Cloud Run, or a couple of virtual machines cover most workloads with far less to operate. Kubernetes earns its place at real scale, or when workloads must move between providers. If we do recommend it, we make sure someone is paid to look after it.
How much can we save on our cloud bill?
An estate that grew without much planning usually shows 20 to 40% avoidable spend. Some of that is an afternoon's work, like unattached volumes and oversized instances. Some needs an architectural change and takes months. The report separates the two and ranks them by effort and payback.
How long does a cloud migration take?
A small estate moves in six to ten weeks. A larger one with legacy dependencies is more often four to nine months, done in phases. The assessment gives you an estimate for each workload. We quote ranges, because a single date for a migration usually slips.
Can you support us out of hours?
Yes. Either we monitor it with agreed response times, or we set up the on-call rota, alerting and runbooks so your own team can carry it. Most clients start with us on the rota and take it in-house once the estate has been quiet for a few months.
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