Foundations
that scale predictably —
and bill predictably.
Cloud architectures designed around your actual workload — not the vendor slide deck. Cost-aware, observability-first, infrastructure-as-code from day one. The kind of foundation you stop thinking about.
The cloud bill is
a design artefact.
Most cloud overspending isn't a procurement problem — it's an architecture problem one or two diagrams ago. By the time the invoice arrives, the decision that caused it is months old.
We design cloud the way other engineers design databases: workload first, cost shape inferred, observability planned, vendor coupling minimised — before any resource gets provisioned.
- Right-sized greenfield architectures
- Cost & reliability audits with written verdicts
- Migrations from on-prem or legacy clouds
- Observability-first platform foundations
- Multi-cloud-for-resume reasons
- Kubernetes when ECS or a single VM would do
- Premium managed services without a workload reason
- "Lift & shift" with no architectural verdict
Most teams over-build by two rungs.
There is a ladder of architectural complexity. Each rung up costs more — in money, latency, on-call burden, and time to onboard a new engineer. The right architecture is the lowest rung that fits the workload.
↪ The first rung your workload can't sustain is the rung you should be on. Not the rung your last conference talk was about.
Six shapes of infrastructure work.
New platform foundations
Designing the cloud spine for a new product or business unit. Cost shape, observability, and security baked in before the first deploy.
On-prem & legacy migrations
Strangler-fig moves from datacentre, Heroku, or older AWS estates into a modern, audited, costed cloud foundation. No big-bang.
FinOps & cost audits
A structured pass over an existing estate. Median saving across our audits is 38% — usually without compromising reliability or velocity.
Reliability & SRE bring-up
SLOs, alerting, on-call runbooks, post-mortem culture. Often where the team is one outage away from being convinced they need it.
Hardening & compliance
IAM tightening, secrets handling, network segmentation, audit trails. The plumbing your SOC2 / ISO auditor expects to find before they ask.
CI/CD & developer platform
The pipes that make shipping cheap and safe — pipelines, environments, previews, feature flags. Velocity is a property of the platform, not the team.
The boring scaffolding
that makes infrastructure
forgettable.
Infrastructure as code
Terraform or CDK, version-controlled, reviewable. The cloud console is for reading, not writing. No clicked-into-existence resources.
Observability first
Logs, metrics, traces wired in before the second feature ships. You hear about the fault before your customer does. Always.
Tested backups
Every backup restore-tested on a schedule. An untested backup is a hope, not a recovery plan.
Zero-touch deploys
One PR merge → production in under ten minutes, with rollback in seconds. Heroes are a smell; pipelines are the answer.
Least-privilege IAM
No long-lived keys. Scoped roles per service, audited at review-time. A breach should fail to escalate, not fail to detect.
Cost telemetry
Cost-per-tenant, cost-per-feature, cost-per-deploy — surfaced in the same dashboards as latency. You can't optimise what isn't observable.
AWS, GCP, Hetzner — and when each is right.
↪ Architectures behind adapters: switching primary providers should take a quarter, not a rebuild.
Four phases — no big-bang at any of them.
Whether we're greenfielding or migrating, the rhythm is the same: diagnose, design, deliver in slices, and stay long enough to hand off cleanly.
Audit
Existing estate read end-to-end: cost, reliability, security, velocity. Output: a written brief and a ranked verdict.
Design
Target architecture chosen on the ladder. IaC repo scaffolded, network + IAM model agreed, cost model written down.
Deliver
Slice-by-slice cutover. Every slice is independently revertable. The team rehearses rollback before it ever runs in production.
Operate
We stay on as the platform grows: tuning, evolving, transferring knowledge to your team — until you no longer need us.
Three ways to start.
Audit
Two-week structured review of an existing cloud estate: cost, reliability, security, developer velocity. Written brief at handover.
- Ranked savings list (median 38%)
- Reliability & security verdict
- Written brief — yours to keep
Build / Migrate
End-to-end design and delivery of a new cloud foundation, or a slice-by-slice migration from on-prem or legacy clouds.
- 100% IaC, version-controlled
- All six reliability standards baked in
- Knowledge transfer from week one
Operate
We own the platform end-to-end as your fractional infra team — on-call, evolution, FinOps — until your team takes the keys.
- SLA-backed (target 99.95%)
- Quarterly cost & reliability review
- Hand-off plan from day one
↪ Indicative. Every engagement is scoped from a written brief — no hourly surprises, no change-request theatre.
A SaaS platform cut its bill from €32k to €11k a month — while improving reliability.
"We didn't change clouds. We changed the architecture inside the same one, and stopped paying for things we didn't use."
The questions we hear on every first call.
Mostly versions of "are we on the wrong cloud", "can we actually leave", and "what about Kubernetes". Fair questions.
Q · 01
"Should we be on AWS / GCP / Azure / Hetzner?"
+
"Should we be on AWS / GCP / Azure / Hetzner?"
Q · 02
"Do we need Kubernetes?"
+
"Do we need Kubernetes?"
Q · 03
"How do we leave a cloud if we have to?"
+
"How do we leave a cloud if we have to?"
Q · 04
"What's the smallest engagement that's worth it?"
+
"What's the smallest engagement that's worth it?"
Q · 05
"Can you work alongside our existing platform team?"
+
"Can you work alongside our existing platform team?"
What's the line on your cloud bill nobody can fully explain?
That's the right place to start. Bring it to a 30-minute call — we'll tell you, honestly, what the audit would find and what it would take to fix it.