Get onto AWS properly —
and stay there affordably
Migration is the easy half. The hard half is a landing zone that satisfies your auditors, a bill that does not creep, and a platform your engineers can ship on every day. That is the half we specialise in.
You probably recognise at least two of these
“The bill went up again.”
Spend growing faster than revenue, nobody able to explain which team caused it, and a finance team that has stopped believing the forecast.
“Our lease expires next year.”
A datacentre exit with a hard date, a portfolio nobody has fully inventoried, and applications whose owners left in 2019.
“We lifted and shifted, and it got worse.”
The same architecture, now rented by the hour. No autoscaling, no managed services, and an on-call roster that has not improved.
“Every release is an event.”
Manual change windows, weekend cutovers and a deployment process that requires a specific person to be awake.
“Audit asked for evidence.”
CPS 234, the Essential Eight or ISO 27001 controls that exist in a document but not in the account — and a deadline attached.
“We can't get to the AI part.”
Data trapped in systems that cannot be reached safely, so every AI initiative dies at the proof-of-concept boundary.
What a cloud engagement covers
Six workstreams. You can take all of them as a program, or any one of them as a standalone piece of work.
Discovery & Well-Architected Review
An evidence-based read of your estate against the six pillars, with findings ranked by risk and effort — and a remediation plan we can execute or hand to your team.
- Automated resource and dependency discovery
- Six-pillar findings with severity and effort scoring
- Prioritised remediation backlog
Landing zone & guardrails
A multi-account foundation on AWS Control Tower with the boring, essential things done properly: identity, network boundaries, logging, backup and preventative controls.
- Account vending and Service Control Policies
- IAM Identity Center federated to your IdP
- Centralised logging, backup and encryption baseline
Migration execution
Wave-based delivery using AWS Application Migration Service and DMS where lift-and-shift is right, and targeted re-architecture where it is not.
- 6R disposition per application
- Cutover runbooks with tested rollback
- Parallel-run and reconciliation for critical data
Modernisation
Monolith decomposition, containerisation on EKS or Fargate, event-driven patterns and the move from self-managed databases to Aurora, DynamoDB and OpenSearch.
- Strangler-fig decomposition with measurable milestones
- Kubernetes platform with GitOps delivery
- Serverless where it genuinely lowers total cost
FinOps
Visibility first, then structural savings, then a rhythm that holds. We aim for savings that survive twelve months, not a one-week dip after a rightsizing sweep.
- Tagging, allocation and per-team showback
- Savings Plans and RI portfolio management
- Anomaly detection with owner-routed alerts
Managed run
Once it is live, someone has to own the pager. Australian-hours L2 support with 24×7 L3 escalation, monthly reporting and a continuous improvement backlog.
- Proactive monitoring against agreed SLOs
- Patching, backup verification and DR testing
- Quarterly architecture and cost review
What twelve months actually looks like
Indicative shape of a mid-size datacentre exit — roughly 80 applications, two sites, one immovable lease date.
Governance: fortnightly steering committee, weekly delivery stand-up, a single named delivery lead accountable to your program office for the entire engagement.
Months 1–2 · Assess
Discovery agents deployed, portfolio inventoried, dispositions agreed, business case signed off and wave plan locked.
Months 2–4 · Foundation
Landing zone live, network connectivity established, security controls deployed, CI/CD and observability in place. First pilot application migrated end to end.
Months 4–10 · Waves
Six to eight waves of five to fifteen applications, each with its own cutover weekend, test plan and rollback. Cost tracked against forecast weekly.
Months 9–12 · Optimise & exit
Rightsizing, commitment purchasing, decommissioning of on-premises kit, evidence pack for audit, and handover or transition into managed run.
The stack we work in every day
Compute & containers
EKS · ECS Fargate · Lambda · EC2 · Karpenter · Graviton
Data
Aurora · DynamoDB · Redshift · S3 · Glue · Iceberg · MSK
Platform & IaC
Terraform · CDK · Control Tower · GitHub Actions · Argo CD
Security & ops
Security Hub · GuardDuty · CloudWatch · OpenTelemetry · Grafana
Start with a Well-Architected Review
Two weeks, a fixed price, and a prioritised list of exactly what is wrong with your AWS estate and what it will cost to fix. Frequently offset by AWS partner funding.