Cloud architecture & strategy
Cloud design that survives scale and audits. Architects who've done it before.
Lift-and-shift and over-provisioned AZs look cheap until finance and auditors ask harder questions. We place architects who've built Terraform module libraries, negotiated reserved capacity with evidence, and run EKS cutovers that roll back cleanly when IAM boundaries were never documented. You get designs with explicit tradeoffs, cost owners, and rollback paths leadership can defend.
Review your cloud roadmapReference architecture
Multi-AZ cloud landing zone
Core stack
- AWS landing zones
- EKS & GKE platforms
- Terraform governance
- Zero-trust networking
- FinOps & cost architecture
- Security & compliance
8+
Average years in cloud architecture
Principal and senior architects, not consultants who've only drawn diagrams.
Deep-Dive Tech Stack
Cloud architecture is constraint-driven: every service choice carries IAM, state, egress, and exit-cost implications. We match architects who name those constraints in RFCs, not diagrams that hide who owns rollback when the cutover slips.
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AWS landing zones
Well-Architected reviews, multi-account Organizations or Control Tower setup, and DR patterns matched to RTO/RPO instead of default three-AZ everything. They document when Aurora beats RDS, when EKS beats ECS, and when managed-service lock-in is worth the velocity.
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EKS & GKE platforms
Cluster topology, node pools, workload identity, and network policies for pod segmentation. Stateful workloads, upgrade paths without downtime, and autoscaling that does not cost more than the workloads it runs are planned upfront, not discovered during the first incident.
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Terraform governance
Module libraries, remote state with locking, promotion workflows, and drift detection for console hotfixes. IaC standards give auditors Git history instead of screenshots and cut new environment spin-up from days to minutes.
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Zero-trust networking
VPC segmentation, transit gateways, private endpoints for S3 and ECR, and service mesh ingress where east-west traffic needs inspection. Flat VPCs where a compromised dev host reaches production RDS are treated as design failures, not temporary exceptions.
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FinOps & cost architecture
Reserved capacity, spot and savings plans, rightsizing with utilization evidence, and tagging that maps spend to teams. Engagements often yield 25–35% reduction by fixing egress and oversized RDS tiers, not only shutting idle dev boxes.
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Security & compliance
SOC2-ready controls, encryption by default, CloudTrail and Config as code, and IAM boundaries that block privilege escalation across accounts. Evidence collection is designed in, not scrambled before the assessor arrives.
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Migration & event-driven patterns
Phased cutovers with rollback, strangler-fig migrations off legacy VMs, and event-driven integration when synchronous coupling blocks scale. Architects sequence work to business deadlines with CQRS and GitOps where consistency matters more than console speed.
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Well-Architected & DR design
Reviews against reliability, security, and cost pillars with remediation backlogs tied to business risk. Multi-region failover, RPO/RTO targets, and game-day validation so DR is rehearsed before an AZ outage, not discovered during one.
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Service mesh (Istio / Linkerd)
mTLS between services, traffic shifting for canaries, and observability on east-west calls without instrumenting every app manually. Mesh policies enforce encryption and rate limits where legacy apps cannot be patched quickly enough for compliance deadlines.
Architecture outcomes we optimize for
- Average years in cloud architecture
- 8+
- Typical cloud spend reduction
- 25–35%
- Migration roadmaps we've delivered
- 6–12 mo
- Tolerance for mystery billing lines
- Zero
Principal and senior architects, not consultants who've only drawn diagrams.
After rightsizing and reserved capacity planning on workloads we've reviewed.
Phased cutovers with rollback plans, not big-bang weekends with no safety net.
Every environment tagged, every service mapped to a cost owner before sign-off.
Architecture decisions: answered plainly
How do you handle time-zone crossovers?
Architecture work is meeting-heavy early, async later. We book overlap for discovery workshops and steering committees, then shift to written RFCs and Loom walkthroughs so your US or EU leads aren't stuck in midnight calls.
Do you recommend multi-cloud or single-cloud?
We follow your constraints (regulatory, talent, existing contracts), not a vendor quota. If single-cloud simplifies ops and meets your DR requirements, we'll say so. Multi-cloud only when the business case clears the ops tax.
What is your code review process for architecture deliverables?
RFCs go through peer review on our side before you see them. We cover failure modes, cost projections, and security gaps. Diagrams ship with decision logs so future teams know why something was built, not just how.
Can architects work alongside our existing platform team?
Yes. We embed as staff augmentation, not a parallel consulting track. Your platform engineers stay owners; our architects fill capacity gaps on design, migration, and review cycles.
How do you handle vendor lock-in concerns?
We document exit costs upfront: managed service dependencies, data egress, proprietary APIs. Portable patterns (K8s, Postgres, S3-compatible storage) get flagged when lock-in risk outweighs the velocity gain.
