Cloud, DevOps & reliability
Cloud, DevOps & Reliability
Build and operate reliable systems with automated deployments, monitoring, backups and infrastructure that can scale with the business.
Plan safer releases and recovery
Start with the business impact of downtime, difficult releases and infrastructure costs. A defined infrastructure improvement can be a standalone project; ongoing monitoring and incident support are a separate arrangement.
- What to bring
- Bring the current hosting setup, deployment process, known incidents and access arrangements.
- What we agree first
- A prioritised risk review and an agreed release, monitoring or recovery improvement.
Illustrative example · not client work
A release and recovery checklist
- Before release: validate the change in staging and check the backup and recovery instructions.
- Release: deploy the approved version and check key customer actions.
- If checks fail: follow the agreed rollback plan, investigate and record the outcome.
Where this fits
- Releases are manual, risky, or depend on one person being available.
- Nobody is alerted when something breaks until a customer reports it.
- Infrastructure has grown without documentation or a clear owner.
- Busy periods cause slowdowns, errors or downtime.
Benefits to work towards
- Fewer surprises in production
- Faster, safer releases
- A clear response when something breaks
Start with the cost of disruption
Downtime, difficult releases, uncertain recovery and rising infrastructure bills have different consequences for each business. Identify the important customer and staff tasks, the periods when they matter most, and the recovery expectations before choosing infrastructure changes.
A review, migration, deployment improvement or recovery exercise can be a defined project. Ongoing monitoring and incident response are separate services with coverage agreed explicitly.
Make releases repeatable
A documented deployment process, automated checks and a representative staging environment help reduce release risk. Agree what to check after deployment, who can authorise rollback and how to recover data where rolling back code alone is insufficient.
Check the recovery path
Monitoring helps identify failures; it cannot promise to find every problem before a customer does. Alerts need an owner and a response arrangement. Backups need retention rules and restore exercises that demonstrate whether the agreed recovery target is practical.
Review infrastructure costs against usage and business needs, and document the trade-offs behind any reduction in redundancy or capacity.
Infrastructure and recovery scope
Infrastructure and releases
- AWS, Google Cloud and Firebase
- Cloud architecture and migration
- Docker and containerised deployments
- CI/CD pipelines
- Infrastructure configuration and automation
Visibility and response
- Centralised application logging
- Error and performance monitoring
- Uptime and availability monitoring
- Alerting and incident response
Recovery and costs
- Backups and disaster recovery
- Security and dependency updates
- Cloud-cost optimisation
Typical use cases
A growing application needs monitoring and alerting before the next busy season.
A team needs automated deployments instead of manual releases.
Infrastructure costs need review before they scale further.
Technical confidence
Service levels, alert thresholds and backup schedules are defined per system rather than promised as a blanket figure. See Technical Capabilities for how we approach observability in more depth.
See our full technical capabilities →