Cloud & Infrastructure Consulting

We design for the team you have, not the one the reference architecture assumes. That usually means managed services over self-hosting, and technology that will still be unremarkable in five years. Self-hosting earns its place occasionally, at unusual scale or under unusual constraints, and when it does we'll recommend it without hedging.

A structured look at what you're running, starting from what's in the accounts rather than what's in the documentation. You get a short list in priority order: what will break, what costs money for no reason, what nobody can safely change, and what's fine and should be left alone. Half the value is usually in that last category.

Into the cloud, between clouds, or off a platform that stopped making sense. We plan around the ugly parts first: stateful data, DNS cutover, the integration nobody documented. Cutovers get rehearsed, rollbacks get tested, and nothing moves on a Friday.

We put your infrastructure into Terraform or OpenTofu, including the resources someone clicked together in 2021 that everyone has been afraid of since. The code stays plain: modules where repetition hurts, no abstraction layers your team will have to reverse-engineer later. Good IaC means a new hire can read the plan output and know what's about to happen.

The first question is whether you need it at all, and you'll get a straight answer before any YAML is written. Kubernetes is built for running many services from many teams; it is a lot of machinery for three containers and a database.

Not using it: for a small number of services, ECS, Container Apps, or plain VMs behind a load balancer are easier to operate and easier to hire for.

Managed (EKS, AKS): the sensible default when you genuinely need Kubernetes. The control plane becomes someone else's pager.

Self-hosted: owning etcd, upgrades, CNI, and certificate rotation is a full-time job that produces nothing your customers can see. Almost nobody should.

Containerization that stops at the point of usefulness. Reproducible images, builds measured in minutes rather than tens of minutes, base images that get patched, and a registry with some hygiene. If your app runs fine on two VMs, we won't containerize it out of principle.

The goal is a small set of alerts where every page means a human needs to act, at that hour, on that thing. We wire up metrics, logs, and traces with Prometheus, Grafana, and OpenTelemetry, or make better use of the Datadog you already pay for. Then we delete alarms; deleting the right ones is most of the work.

Reliability work starts from the failures you've already had, not a target copied from a blog post. We remove the single points of failure that matter, test backups by restoring them, and write runbooks that hold up when the person on call is half awake. Five nines is a cost decision, not a virtue; most businesses need fewer nines and faster recovery.

We measure before touching anything, because guessed bottlenecks are usually wrong and the real one is usually the database. Query plans, N+1s, connection pools, and caching come before any instance gets bigger. Right-sizing tends to fall out of this work, since slow systems and expensive systems share causes more often than not.