Cloud Architecture

What we deliver

• Architecture review with prioritised remediation list and cost-savings projection
• Infrastructure as Code (Terraform or Azure Bicep) so the architecture is reproducible
• Observability — logs, metrics, traces, alerting before incidents page someone
• Cost controls — reserved instances, savings plans, auto-shutdown, tagging, budgets
• Disaster recovery — backups that are tested, RTO/RPO documented, runbook for failover
• Security baseline — least-privilege IAM, encryption, secrets management, audit logging
• CI/CD pipelines — automated, repeatable deploys with rollback

The 90-day cloud cost win

Most Australian SMBs we audit have a cloud bill 30–50% larger than necessary, almost always for the same reasons:

• Steady-state production running on on-demand instead of reserved or savings-plan pricing
• Dev and staging environments running 24/7 instead of business hours only
• Unattached storage volumes from instances deleted years ago
• Snapshots and backups that no longer have a retention policy
• Data transfer costs from poorly placed services across regions
• Old generations of EC2/VM SKUs running workloads where the new generation is cheaper
• Logs being shipped to expensive observability tiers when most of them are never queried

Our 2-week paid audit identifies these and quantifies them. The audit fee almost always pays for itself in the first month of savings, often within the first week of remediation.

Architecture principles we follow

Boring is good

We default to managed services (RDS over self-hosted Postgres, CloudWatch over self-hosted Prometheus) unless there's a specific reason not to. Boring infrastructure has fewer pages at 3am.

Security as defaults

Encryption at rest and in transit by default. IAM least-privilege by default. Secrets never in code. Audit logs always on. These aren't optional features — they're part of the foundation, and the marginal cost of doing them at design-time is roughly zero.

Observability before incidents

You don't want to learn what your system was doing during an outage from your customers. Logs, metrics, distributed traces, and alerting come with the architecture, not bolted on after the first 3am page.