AWS cloud engineering
AWS has a service for everything, which is both its strength and its trap. We build on the handful that fit the product, keep the architecture explainable, and make sure the bill stays understandable.
Where we use AWS
AWS is part of the stack on these 4 services. Each page covers how we work, what you get and what it costs to start.
AWS in practice
AWS has a managed service for nearly everything, which is its strength and the way most AWS bills get out of hand. The discipline is choosing the smallest set of services that solves the problem and being able to explain the architecture on one page. Every additional service is another thing to secure, monitor, understand and pay for.
Cost is an architectural property, not a procurement one. Right-sizing, storage lifecycle rules, idle resources and cross-AZ data transfer are where the money quietly goes, and none of them are visible unless someone looks. We define infrastructure in Terraform so that what exists is reviewable, which is also what makes the bill explainable.
What we build with AWS
ECS, Lambda and RDS setups sized to real traffic, defined in code rather than assembled by hand in a console.
S3 and CloudFront for assets and media, with cache rules that make a global audience feel local.
Queues, event buses and scheduled processing connecting services without direct coupling between them.
Is AWS right for you?
Ask usA good fit when
- Products needing breadth of managed services
- Global audiences requiring multi-region presence
- Enterprise procurement that expects specific compliance certifications
- Teams with existing AWS experience
Probably not when
- Small projects where a simpler platform would cost less to run and to think about
- Teams with no cloud operations capacity — managed platforms may serve better
- Workloads whose cost profile clearly suits scale-to-zero elsewhere
What we run alongside AWS
The rest of the setup, and why each piece is there. We keep this list short on purpose — every dependency is something someone has to maintain.
- Terraform
- Infrastructure as code, so the estate is reviewable and reproducible.
- ECS Fargate or EKS
- Containers without managing instances; EKS once Kubernetes is genuinely warranted.
- RDS Aurora
- Managed Postgres or MySQL with failover and backups handled.
- CloudFront + S3
- Static assets and media served from the edge, off your application entirely.
- Cost Explorer + budgets
- Alerts before a surprise, rather than an invoice explaining one.
- IAM least privilege
- Scoped roles per service. The single most common gap we find in AWS accounts.
Why AWS
Let’s talkDepth of services
Whatever the requirement, a managed service usually exists — which beats operating it yourself in almost every case.
Mature global footprint
Regions and edge locations worldwide, with the compliance certifications enterprise procurement asks for.
Well-trodden ground
Almost every problem you will hit has been documented by someone else first.
What we get called in to fix
Get a second opinionBills nobody can explain
Idle instances, unattached volumes, forgotten NAT gateways and stale snapshots.
Over-permissive IAM
Wildcard policies granting far more than the workload needs, usually from an early hurry.
Click-built infrastructure
Estates assembled in the console, undocumented and impossible to recreate after an incident.
Cross-AZ transfer costs
Chatty services spread across availability zones, paying per gigabyte for internal traffic.
AWS or the alternative
The comparisons we are actually asked to make, answered the way we would answer them on a call.
GCP for containers, scale-to-zero and analytics. AWS for breadth of services and enterprise familiarity.
Azure when the organisation is Microsoft-centric and identity should follow the directory. AWS otherwise.
ECS for most container workloads — far less to operate. EKS when you genuinely need Kubernetes primitives.
AWS works well with:
Azure
Google Cloud
Python
Docker
Go
Grafana
Java
Kubernetes
MongoDB
Node.js
PHPGot an idea? Let’s make it real.
Tell us the short version
This could be the first step towards a new and successful collaboration. A one-line idea and a finished spec are both fine — tell us the problem, the deadline you’re working to and what’s in your way.
Keep looking
Frequently asked questions
Usually. The recurring wins are right-sizing, storage lifecycle rules, idle resources and egress patterns nobody reviewed since launch.
Yes. We define infrastructure as code so environments are reproducible and changes are reviewable.
Whichever fits your team and existing estate. The differences that matter are usually organisational, not technical.
Yes — cost, security posture and architecture, delivered as a written report with prioritised actions rather than a dashboard screenshot.
Either we run it, or we hand it over with Terraform, runbooks and monitoring in place. We agree which before the work starts.