Cloud migration & re-platforming
Assessment, wave planning and execution across AWS, Azure and Google Cloud — with each application assigned the right treatment rather than all of them lifted and shifted.
05 — Cloud
Cloud Solutions
Migration, cloud-native architecture and the cost discipline that stops a cloud bill growing faster than the business it supports.
Overview
Cloud is a bill as much as a platform
Moving to the cloud is easy to start and expensive to get wrong. A lift-and-shift with no re-architecture usually costs more to run than the data centre it replaced, and the savings everyone was promised turn up two years late, after a second project to fix the first one.
We treat cloud as an engineering and financial problem at the same time: architecture that uses managed services where they earn their premium, infrastructure defined in code so environments are reproducible, and cost visibility from the first workload rather than the first shocking invoice.
A
Costed before it is built
Every design comes with a modelled monthly run-rate, so architecture choices are made with the bill in view.
B
Reproducible by definition
Terraform and pipeline definitions mean any environment can be rebuilt from an empty account, not from someone's memory.
C
Canadian regions by default
Workloads land in Canadian regions unless there is a specific reason not to, with residency confirmed in writing.
What's included
Cloud work we take on
First migration, second-wave optimisation, or taking over a cloud estate that grew faster than anyone documented.
Cloud-native architecture
Containers, serverless, managed databases and event services chosen on the merits of the workload, not on which one is fashionable this year.
Kubernetes & container platforms
EKS, AKS and GKE clusters with sane defaults for networking, autoscaling, secrets and multi-tenancy — plus the runbooks your team needs to operate them.
Infrastructure as code
Terraform modules, environment promotion and policy-as-code so infrastructure changes go through review the same way application changes do.
FinOps & cost optimisation
Tagging, showback by team, rightsizing, savings-plan strategy and anomaly alerts — typically 25–40% off an unmanaged bill in the first quarter.
Reliability & observability
SLOs, error budgets, distributed tracing, structured logging and alerting that pages a human only when a human is needed.
How we work
A cloud programme that lands
01
Assess and model
Application inventory, dependency mapping and a run-rate model for each migration treatment, so the business case is real before anything moves.
02
Build the landing zone
Accounts, networking, identity, guardrails and CI/CD pipelines set up once, correctly, so every later workload inherits them.
03
Migrate in waves
Low-risk workloads first to prove the pipeline, then progressively more critical ones, each with a tested rollback.
04
Optimise and hand over
Rightsizing, commitment purchasing and cost alerting, followed by documented runbooks and training for the team that will operate it.
Why it pays off
What good cloud engineering delivers
A bill you can explain
Tagging and showback mean every line of the invoice traces to a team and a workload, so optimisation stops being guesswork.
Environments in minutes
A new environment becomes a pipeline run rather than a two-week ticket queue, which changes how quickly teams can test anything.
Failure stops being dramatic
Autoscaling, multi-AZ defaults and tested restores turn a bad afternoon into a graph that dipped and recovered.
Technologies we reach for
AWSAzureGoogle CloudKubernetesDockerTerraformHelmArgoCDPrometheusGrafanaOpenTelemetryDatadogGitHub ActionsCloudflare
FAQ
Questions we get asked
Usually the one your team already knows, unless a specific requirement overrides that — an existing enterprise agreement, a managed service only one provider offers well, or a data-residency constraint. The operational cost of a platform nobody on staff understands almost always exceeds the list-price difference between providers. We will model the comparison rather than default to a favourite.
Not on its own. A straight lift-and-shift typically costs 10–30% more to run than the hardware it replaced, because you are renting peak capacity around the clock. Savings come from re-architecting to scale with demand, retiring idle workloads and buying commitments against a known baseline. We model both the migration cost and the steady-state run-rate before you commit, and we will tell you when the honest answer is that staying put is cheaper.
Yes. AWS, Azure and Google Cloud all operate Canadian regions, and we default to them. We pin resource creation to those regions with policy-as-code so a future engineer cannot accidentally deploy elsewhere, and we document which third-party services in the stack process data outside Canada so you can make an informed decision about each one.
Let's talk
Tell us what you are trying to build
Book a free consultation call. You will speak to a senior architect, not a salesperson, and leave with a technical direction and a realistic budget band — before you commit to anything.
- A senior architect on the first call
- A written proposal within 3 business days
- Full IP ownership assigned to you on delivery