Service · AWS · Azure

Cloud Architecture

Australian businesses asking the same three questions: is our cloud bill reasonable, is our security actually configured, and will any of this scale when we 5x growth? We answer those questions with audits, then implement what's needed — IaC, observability, cost controls, no PowerPoint.

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.

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Cloud architecture FAQ

Default Azure if you're a Microsoft shop (running .NET, using Microsoft 365, with admins comfortable in Active Directory). Default AWS if your team is more Linux/open-source-leaning, or you're a startup needing the broadest service catalogue. Both have Sydney and Melbourne regions with full feature parity for almost everything Australian businesses need. Cost is roughly comparable — choose based on team skills, not pricing.
It means building infrastructure where the bill is predictable and you understand what each line item does. Concretely: tagging every resource with cost-centre, using reserved instances or savings plans for steady-state workloads, auto-scaling for variable workloads, archiving cold data to cheaper tiers, and shutting down dev environments outside business hours. Most clients we audit can cut 30–50% off their cloud bill in the first 90 days through these basics — without reducing performance.
Serverless wins when traffic is bursty or unpredictable, when you want to pay only for actual use, and when the workload is stateless. Containers win when you have steady high traffic (cheaper at scale), need predictable cold-start latency, or run anything stateful. For most Australian SMBs we see, serverless is right for APIs and event handlers; containers are right for the database layer and long-running jobs.
Architecture review and recommendations: 2–3 weeks. Migration from on-premise or one cloud to another: 8–24 weeks depending on scope. Ground-up architecture for a new system: scoped as part of the build (typically 1–2 weeks of architecture work upfront). We don't sell open-ended consulting retainers — every engagement has defined deliverables.
We implement. The diagrams and decision logs are deliverables, but they exist alongside production-grade Terraform or Bicep that creates the infrastructure. You can run the IaC yourself afterwards. Architecture-only consulting (slides without implementation) is rarely the right shape — the value is in working infrastructure, not PowerPoint.
Both AWS and Azure have Australian regions (Sydney/Melbourne) with full feature parity for almost all services. We pin all data residency to AU regions by default. For specific compliance scenarios (IRAP, healthcare, government), we work within Azure for Australia or AWS GovCloud equivalents — happy to discuss your specific requirements on a discovery call.

Get an honest cloud architecture review

Book a free 30-minute call. We'll talk through your current setup and tell you honestly whether you need an audit, a migration, or just three quick fixes.

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