Home / Practice / Cloud Engineering
— Practice 04 · Infrastructure

Cloud that does its job
quietly,
and bills you for it honestly.

Secure-by-default landing zones, infrastructure-as-code, FinOps with a sharpened pencil, and migrations that don't break the business. The cloud foundation everything else gets built on, done properly, and done once.

// 01
10+
Landing zones designed & deployed
// 02
38%
Avg. cloud-bill reduction post-FinOps
// 03
100%
Environments managed as code
// 04
< 15min
Mean time to detect cloud incidents
— The thesis

Infrastructure as code.
Security as a default.

Cloud engineering is the substrate everything else runs on. Done well, it's invisible, environments come up reproducibly, costs stay predictable, security is enforced at the boundary, and engineers ship without raising a ticket. Done badly, it's the reason your features take a quarter to launch and your bill keeps creeping.

We treat cloud as software: every resource defined in Terraform, every change peer-reviewed and CI-tested, every account governed by a landing zone, every cost line tagged and accounted for. Drift is detected. Secrets are managed. The principle of least privilege is the default, not the aspiration.

The boring outcome: environments that come up the same way every time, across AWS, Azure, and GCP, with the guardrails security and finance need, and the velocity engineering wants.

— What's inside

Anatomy of a cloud estate

Every cloud estate we build has the same five concerns. Skip one and it'll be the one auditors find first. So we don't skip them.

// 01

Landing zone & accounts

Multi-account structure with org-level guardrails, SCPs, baseline networking, and identity federation. The substrate every workload account inherits from.

Control Tower AWS Organizations Azure Landing Zones SCPs / Azure Policy
// 02

Network & perimeter

VPC / VNet topology, transit hubs, private connectivity, DNS, egress control, and WAF / DDoS at the edge. Built once, extended cleanly.

Transit Gateway VNet Peering PrivateLink Cloudflare Route 53
// 03

Workloads & compute

Containers, serverless, or managed PaaS — picked for the workload, not the brochure. EKS / AKS / GKE patterns with autoscaling, blue/green, and progressive delivery.

EKS / AKS / GKE Lambda App Service Cloud Run Fargate
// 04

Security & identity

IAM with least privilege, secrets managed, keys rotated, traffic inspected. Findings triaged and remediated, not just logged.

IAM / Entra ID Secrets Manager KMS / Key Vault Security Hub Defender
// 05

Observability & FinOps

Metrics, logs, traces, and cost, in one pane. SLOs with error budgets. Tag policies that make every dollar accountable to a team.

CloudWatch Azure Monitor Grafana Datadog CUR / Cost Mgmt
— Capabilities

What we actually do

Six cloud capabilities, mapped to where most cloud estates leak, cost, security, velocity. Most engagements start with a landing-zone or FinOps audit, that's where the easy wins live.

// 01

Landing zones & IaC

Multi-account / multi-subscription estates with Terraform modules, baseline guardrails, and identity federation that survives the first audit.

  • Terraform / Bicep / Pulumi
  • Control Tower & Azure LZ
  • Module libraries & CI
// 02

Networking & perimeter

Hub-and-spoke topologies, private connectivity, DNS, egress control, WAF and DDoS at the edge. Engineered to extend, not be rebuilt every quarter.

  • Transit GW / VWAN / Cloud Interconnect
  • PrivateLink & service endpoints
  • Edge security (WAF, Bot, DDoS)
// 03

Kubernetes & platforms

EKS / AKS / GKE platforms that engineers actually want to ship to. Golden paths, internal developer platforms, progressive delivery, autoscaling.

  • EKS / AKS / GKE
  • ArgoCD / Flux GitOps
  • Backstage & IDPs
// 04

Security & compliance

Least-privilege IAM, secrets and key management, traffic inspection, and continuous compliance against SOC 2 / ISO 27001 / PCI / POPIA controls.

  • IAM design & SSO / SCIM
  • Secrets & key rotation
  • Security Hub / Defender
// 05

FinOps & cost

Tagging policies, showback / chargeback, savings plans, right-sizing, and a monthly cadence that makes finance stop dreading the bill.

  • Tag governance & CUR
  • Reservations & savings plans
  • Right-sizing & idle hunt
// 06

Migration & modernisation

Lift, shift, or refactor, done with a real cutover plan. Move workloads off legacy data centres, onto managed services, or between clouds.

  • Discovery & wave planning
  • App rehost / replatform / refactor
  • Cutover & rollback playbooks
— Platforms

The technologies we build on.

The hyperscalers we build on, the IaC we write in, and the tooling we wire in around them. Cloud-agnostic where it matters, opinionated where it counts. See Partners.

AWS

Amazon Web Services

Advanced Tier Services Partner

Our deepest hyperscaler bench. Control Tower landing zones, EKS platforms, serverless apps, and the full FinOps loop on CUR and Cost Explorer.

AZ

Microsoft Azure

Solutions Partner · Infra & Digital App

Azure Landing Zones, AKS, Entra ID, and the Microsoft estate end-to-end. Where existing Microsoft footprint or compliance pulls you in.

TF

Terraform

Infrastructure as code

Our default IaC. Reusable modules, peer-reviewed CI, drift detection, and policy-as-code with Sentinel or OPA where it earns its keep.

K8s

Kubernetes

Container platforms & GitOps

EKS, AKS, GKE or self-managed where regulation demands. ArgoCD / Flux for GitOps, progressive delivery, and platforms engineers actually like.

— How we engage

Three ways to start

Three shapes of engagement, depending on whether you need a cloud opinion, a delivery team, or someone to run the estate once it's up.

// 01 / Consult

Cloud audit

Well-Architected review, FinOps deep-dive, and security posture assessment. Output: a prioritised list of what's risky, what's expensive, and what to fix first.

  • Well-Architected review
  • FinOps & bill analysis
  • Security posture & compliance
  • Prioritised remediation plan
// 02 / Build

Cloud delivery

Engineers embedded with your team, shipping landing zones, platforms, and migrations in fortnightly sprints. Knowledge-transfer baked in — we leave the team better than we found it.

  • Greenfield landing-zone builds
  • Data-centre migrations
  • Kubernetes & IDP rollouts
  • Security & FinOps remediation
// 03 / Run

Managed cloud

We operate your cloud estate — patching, monitoring, incident response, security findings, and a monthly FinOps cadence that finds the savings before they cost you again.

  • Patching, upgrades, & ops
  • Incident response, 24/7
  • Monthly FinOps reviews
  • Quarterly architecture refresh
— A typical engagement

From nothing to shipped.

Most cloud engagements run on this rhythm. We've shipped this exact shape for retail banks, insurers, and a continental telco.

STEP 01 ·

Map & scope

Audit existing accounts, workloads, network, and bill. Map target architecture and migration / build waves. Output: a one-page roadmap and target estate diagram.

STEP 02 ·

Scaffold & standards

Landing zone, Terraform module library, CI/CD, observability, secrets, identity, tagging policy. The substrate every workload account will inherit.

STEP 03 ·

Build & ship

Workload accounts, platforms, and migration waves in fortnightly sprints, peer-reviewed by your engineers. Each sprint ends with something live in production.

STEP 04 ·

Operate & evolve

Hand over, run alongside, or run for you. The estate stays operable either way — patched, observed, and FinOps'd to within an inch of its life.

— Managed service

Managed Cloud

Our managed cloud operation, landing zone, workload accounts, observability, security findings, and FinOps, all on an SLA.

We believe every business should get the benefits of cloud without having to build and retain a full cloud team to run it. Managed Cloud makes that possible, at a fraction of the cost of in-house, with the same engineering bar.

  • Landing-zone operation
  • Patching, upgrades, & backups
  • Security findings & response
  • Monthly FinOps reviews
  • On-call & incident response
  • Quarterly architecture reviews
// service · live
Managed Cloud
LZ
PATCH
SEC
COST
// SLA 99.9% REGION · ZA / UK
— Signature engagement

Multi-account landing zone for banking.

AWS Control Tower with a Terraform module library, hub-and-spoke networking, SCP guardrails, SSO via Entra ID, and a tagged-and-billable cost model from day one.

/// outcome

300+ accounts, 100% IaC, 41% bill reduction.

Every account spun up from the same Terraform modules, every change peer-reviewed and CI-tested, every dollar tagged to a team. FinOps cadence in month three found the savings; security baseline meant zero P1 audit findings two cycles running.

16
Accounts
41%
Bill reduction
0
P1 audit findings
ORG ROOT SHARED SVC WORKLOAD SANDBOX
— Bring us a cloud problem

Bring us the estate.
We'll bring the engineering for it.

Cloud audit, greenfield landing zone, migration wave, or full managed operation, start with a 30-minute call.