07Cloud Architecture
Infrastructure your team can actually operate.
Cloud architecture, platform engineering and cost control for organisations that need reliability targets met without an infrastructure team of thirty.
01Where it starts
What we usually walk into.
Cloud estates grow by accident. Environments drift, nobody can rebuild production from source, costs rise faster than usage, and reliability depends on the two people who remember how it was set up.
Staging and production have drifted and nobody knows by how much.
Cloud spend doubled while traffic grew by a fifth.
We cannot rebuild production if we lose it.
Deployments require a specific person to be online.
We committed to an availability target we have no way to measure.
02Approach
How we do the work.
We define reliability targets first, then build reproducible infrastructure from code with the observability and operational practice to meet them — sized to the team that has to run it.
- 01
Reliability targets before topology
We agree what the business actually requires — availability, recovery time, recovery point — and design to it. Most over-engineered infrastructure exists because nobody wrote the target down.
- 02
Everything reproducible from source
Infrastructure as code, with environments built by the same pipeline. If production cannot be recreated from a repository, it is not architecture, it is archaeology.
- 03
Right-sized platform
Kubernetes is a good answer to some problems and an expensive answer to others. We recommend the smallest platform that meets the requirement, including managed services and boring choices.
- 04
Cost as an architectural property
Cost is designed, not discovered on the invoice. We model spend against workload, instrument it per service, and set the alerts that catch drift early.
Capabilities and deliverables
Capabilities
- Cloud architecture on AWS, Azure and Google Cloud
- Kubernetes platform engineering
- Infrastructure as code
- CI/CD and release engineering
- Observability and SLO design
- Disaster recovery and business continuity
- Network and identity architecture
- Cost engineering
What you receive
- Target architecture with documented reliability objectives
- Infrastructure-as-code covering every environment
- CI/CD pipelines with automated, reversible deployments
- Observability stack: metrics, logs, traces and meaningful alerts
- Disaster recovery plan, with a tested restore
- Cost model and per-service attribution
- Runbooks and on-call practice documentation
Common use cases
- Cloud migration and re-platforming
- Kubernetes platform design and hardening
- Multi-environment and multi-region architecture
- Reliability engineering and incident practice
- Cost optimisation without capability loss
- Regulated workload architecture with data residency constraints
Technologies typically involved
- Kubernetes
- Docker
- Terraform
- Helm
- ArgoCD
- Prometheus
- Grafana
- OpenTelemetry
- HashiCorp Vault
- PostgreSQL
- Redis
- NATS
03Engagement
How it runs.
- 01
Assessment
1–2 weeks
Current estate, reliability requirements, cost profile and operational practice.
- 02
Target architecture
2–3 weeks
Designed topology, migration path, cost model and risk register.
- 03
Implementation
Ongoing
Incremental migration with rollback at every step, no big-bang cutover.
- 04
Operational handover
2–4 weeks
Runbooks, alert tuning, incident practice and on-call enablement.
04Security
Security considerations.
These apply to this service specifically. They are engagement conditions, not aspirations, and we will put them in the contract.
- Identity and network segmentation designed together, not sequentially
- Secrets in a managed store with rotation, never in pipeline variables
- Immutable infrastructure — no manual changes to running environments
- Audit logging enabled and retained to the standard your regulator requires
- Configuration drift detection wired into the pipeline
05Outcomes
What changes afterwards.
Environments that can be rebuilt from a repository, costs that track usage, and an on-call rotation that is survivable.
- 01
Any environment can be rebuilt from source, and this has been tested
- 02
Reliability is measured against a target rather than asserted
- 03
Cloud spend is attributable per service and tracks usage
- 04
Deployments are routine, reversible and not dependent on one person
06Questions
Asked before every engagement.
Frequently not. Kubernetes pays off with many services, many teams, or genuinely dynamic scaling requirements. Below that it can add operational cost without adding capability. We will tell you when a managed platform is the better economic answer.
Usually — the common causes are over-provisioned baselines, unused resources, egress patterns and storage tiering. We report the expected saving and the effort to reach it before doing the work, so it stays a business decision.
We favour portable foundations and are explicit whenever a managed service creates lock-in, including what leaving would cost. Sometimes the managed service is still the right call; you should just make that choice knowingly.
Frequently runs alongside
Ready to scopecloud architecture?
Bring the problem, the constraints and the deadline. We will tell you what is achievable, what it costs and what we would do first.