Cloud & DevOps
Migration without a big-bang cutover, infrastructure defined in code so environments are reproducible, and pipelines that make releasing boring. Built to be handed over, not to keep you dependent on us.
Lift-and-shift, and the bill that follows
The most common cloud migration moves servers as they are and changes nothing else. It works, it is quick, and it typically costs more per month than the hardware it replaced — because the whole economic argument for cloud rests on elasticity, and a virtual machine running at ten percent utilisation around the clock is not elastic.
The second pattern is subtler. Infrastructure gets built by hand through a web console, so nobody can say with confidence what is running, why, or whether it can be safely removed. Staging drifts from production. Recreating an environment becomes archaeology.
Both are fixable, and neither requires rewriting your applications as microservices first. Defining what exists in code, right-sizing what is actually running, and making deployment repeatable gets most of the value.
What we do
Migration planning
Workload by workload, in a sequence that starts with something low-risk. Not everything should move — some things are cheaper and simpler where they are, and we will say which.
Infrastructure as code
Terraform or equivalent, so environments are reproducible and reviewable. Recreating production becomes a command rather than a memory exercise.
CI/CD pipelines
Automated build, test and deploy with staged rollouts and a rollback that has actually been tested. Releases should be uneventful enough to do on a Friday.
Cost optimisation
Right-sizing, reserved capacity, storage lifecycle rules and finding the orphaned resources every account accumulates. Usually pays for a meaningful share of the engagement.
Observability
Logs, metrics, traces and alerts that page a person for real problems and stay quiet otherwise. An alert everyone ignores is worse than no alert.
Backup and recovery
Automated backups, and — the part usually skipped — a documented restore that we actually perform, because an untested backup is a hypothesis.
Typical stack
Chosen per project, not by habit. If your team already runs something that works, we use it.
- Cloud
- AWS
- Google Cloud
- Azure
- Render
- Fly.io
- Hetzner
- Infrastructure
- Terraform
- Docker
- Kubernetes where it is warranted
- Ansible
- Pipelines
- GitHub Actions
- GitLab CI
- ArgoCD
- blue-green and canary deploys
- Observability
- Prometheus and Grafana
- OpenTelemetry
- Datadog
- Sentry
How a cloud engagement runs
The goal is to leave you able to operate it. Infrastructure only we understand is a commercial advantage for us and a liability for you, so documentation and handover are part of the work rather than an optional extra.
- 01
Assessment
What runs where, what it costs, what the actual risks are. Written up with options and rough numbers.
- 02
Foundations
Accounts, networking, security baseline and infrastructure-as-code scaffolding before anything moves.
- 03
Migrate in waves
Lowest-risk workload first to prove the process, then progressively more critical ones, each with a rehearsed rollback.
- 04
Handover or run
Documentation and training for your team, or we operate it on a retainer. Either way you could take it in-house within a month.
Common questions
Will moving to the cloud reduce our costs?
Not automatically, and often the opposite for a straight lift-and-shift. Savings come from right-sizing, scaling down what does not need to run constantly, and removing what nobody uses. We model the likely cost during assessment rather than promising a percentage.
Do we need Kubernetes?
Probably not. It solves real problems at real scale and adds significant operational burden below that point. Managed container services or plain virtual machines are the right answer for most teams, and recommending otherwise is usually about the supplier rather than the client.
Can you migrate without downtime?
For most workloads yes, using parallel running and staged traffic switching. Some database migrations need a short maintenance window, and we would rather schedule a planned twenty minutes than attempt a heroic zero-downtime move that risks the data.
Which cloud provider should we use?
Usually the one your team already knows. The technical differences matter far less than the operational familiarity, existing commitments and data residency requirements. We work across all three majors and the smaller platforms.
What if we want to bring this in-house later?
That is the intended outcome for most clients. Everything is in your accounts, defined in code, in your repository, with runbooks. Taking it back means changing who has the on-call phone, not a migration project.
Start with a scoping call.
Thirty minutes, no obligation. If we are not the right fit we will tell you on the call rather than after a proposal.
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