Cloud & Infrastructure
Deployments that are boring, and infrastructure you can rebuild
You can tell a team has no DevOps practice by how they talk about releasing. Deploys happen on Friday afternoon, by hand, with someone watching. Nobody is certain the staging environment matches production. When something breaks at 2am, the first anyone knows is an email from a customer. All three are fixable, and none of them requires a rewrite.
Indicative
Audit from £3,000; setup from £6,000
Fixed price agreed in writing before any build starts.
Get a quote+44 7488 265083The problem this solves
Manual deployment is not just slow, it makes every release a risk decision — so releases get batched, batches get bigger, and each one is more dangerous than the last. Meanwhile infrastructure that only exists as clicks in a console cannot be reviewed, cannot be reproduced, and disappears with whoever configured it.
What you get
A pipeline that gates on tests
GitHub Actions or GitLab CI running your test suite, type checks and a build on every push. Nothing reaches production without passing, so the pipeline is the standard rather than a person remembering.
Infrastructure as code
Terraform for cloud resources so every change is a reviewed pull request with a plan you can read before it applies. The environment becomes reproducible instead of archaeological.
Environments that actually match
Staging built from the same definitions as production, with data volumes realistic enough that a query which is fast in staging is fast in production too.
Zero-downtime releases
Blue-green or rolling deploys with health checks, and a rollback that is one command rather than a scramble. A release you can undo in 60 seconds stops being frightening.
Monitoring with real alerts
Uptime, error rate, response time and queue depth, with thresholds tuned so an alert means something. A dashboard nobody opens is not monitoring; a channel full of alerts nobody reads is worse.
Cost review
Right-sized instances, reserved capacity where usage is predictable, and the storage nobody has looked at since 2022. Cutting a cloud bill by a third with no performance change is common.
How we work
Audit
How you deploy today, what runs where, what is monitored, and what happens when it breaks. Usually a week, and it produces a written picture you can keep regardless of what you do next.
Prioritise by risk
The fix that removes the most risk first — which is almost never the most interesting one. Usually backups you have never restored, or a single server with no replacement plan.
Pipeline first
Automated build, test and deploy to staging before anything touches production. This is where the confidence to change the rest comes from.
Codify the infrastructure
Import what exists into Terraform, then make changes through it. No big-bang rebuild — the running system stays running.
Observability
Metrics, structured logs and alerts, with an on-call routing you agree to.
Handover
Runbooks for the failures that actually happen, and a walkthrough with whoever will be on the end of the pager.
What you should expect
- Deploys go from a scheduled event to a routine one
- Every infrastructure change reviewed before it applies
- Problems detected by monitoring rather than by customers
- Hosting spend reduced without changing performance
Built with
- AWS
- Azure
- DigitalOcean
- Hetzner
- Terraform
- Docker
- Kubernetes
- GitHub Actions
- GitLab CI
- Nginx
- LiteSpeed
- Cloudflare
- Grafana
- Prometheus
- Sentry
Mainstream, well-supported technology — chosen so you can hire for it and so another team could take the project over.
DevOps & Cloud Engineering — your questions
Including the ones about cost, which most agencies leave off the page.
A pipeline and infrastructure-as-code setup for a typical web application starts around £6,000, and an audit alone is £3,000 to £6,000. Ongoing management is quoted monthly against what is actually running rather than as a fixed package.
Probably not. Kubernetes solves problems that appear at a scale most UK SMEs never reach, and it brings real operational overhead — someone has to understand it at 2am. Containers on a managed platform handle the vast majority of workloads with a fraction of the complexity. We will say so rather than sell you the more expensive answer.
Yes. Most of this work is provider-agnostic, and we would rather improve what you have than move you somewhere new for its own sake. If your current host is genuinely the constraint we will show you the numbers.
Three things: every change is reviewable before it happens, the environment can be rebuilt from scratch if it is lost, and the configuration stops living in one person’s head. The third matters most — it is what makes the team replaceable rather than the system fragile.
The pipeline and staging work happens alongside production and changes nothing users see. Production changes are staged, applied outside business hours where there is any risk, and reversible. We do not do big-bang migrations.
We offer UK business-hours response as standard, with out-of-hours cover available as a separate retainer. We are straight about this: genuine 24/7 needs a rota, and a single person claiming round-the-clock cover is not a real service.
Related services
Most projects touch more than one of these.
Server Management
Patching, monitoring, backups that are actually tested, and a named person to call when something is wrong.
Read moreCloud Migration
A phased migration with a rehearsed cutover and a rollback that has been tested, not just written down.
Read moreSecurity Audits & Hardening
A manual audit with working proof of concept for each finding, a prioritised fix plan, and a retest that confirms it.
Read moreCustom Software
Bespoke systems that replace the spreadsheets, manual handoffs and off-the-shelf tools your business has outgrown.
Read moreAPI Development & Integration
APIs other developers can use without asking you questions, and integrations that degrade gracefully when the other end breaks.
Read moreQA & Software Testing
Automated tests on the journeys that actually matter, running in CI, with flakiness treated as a defect.
Read moreTalk to someone who has built this before
A short call is usually enough to tell you whether this is the right service for your situation — including when it is not.