AWS Development & Architecture

For compute: ECS Fargate for containerised workloads and Lambda for event-driven functions. For databases: RDS PostgreSQL and DynamoDB. For storage: S3. For networking: ALB, Route 53, and CloudFront. For messaging: SQS and SNS. We select services based on your workload characteristics, not familiarity - the goal is the simplest architecture that meets your requirements.

Lambda is ideal for event-driven workloads with unpredictable traffic - it scales to zero and costs nothing at rest. ECS Fargate is better for long-running services, workloads with predictable traffic, or applications that need persistent connections. Many production systems use both: Lambda for background jobs and ECS for the web API. We model your traffic patterns and recommend the right compute mix.

We use AWS Organizations with a root management account and separate accounts for security, shared services, and each environment (development, staging, production). Service Control Policies prevent dangerous actions like disabling CloudTrail or changing account settings. This structure provides strong isolation, cleaner cost attribution, and a blast radius limit if one account is compromised.

We tag every resource by team, environment, and product from day one, enabling cost attribution down to the feature level. We configure budget alerts to catch unexpected spend early. After 30 days of production traffic we analyse usage with Cost Explorer and recommend Reserved Instances or Savings Plans. Clients typically reduce their AWS bill by 20-35% within 90 days of a cost engagement.

Yes. We conduct reviews against all five pillars: Operational Excellence, Security, Reliability, Performance Efficiency, and Cost Optimisation. The output is a prioritised list of high, medium, and low-risk findings with concrete remediation steps. We then work through the high-priority items in subsequent sprints.

We distribute workloads across at least two Availability Zones for all stateful components. ALB health checks route traffic away from unhealthy instances automatically. RDS Multi-AZ provides synchronous replication with automatic failover. For stateless compute we use Auto Scaling Groups or ECS Service Auto Scaling to replace failed tasks without manual intervention.

Yes. We design VPC CIDR blocks that support future growth, create public and private subnets in each AZ, configure NAT Gateways for outbound private traffic, and set up VPC endpoints for S3 and DynamoDB to keep that traffic off the public internet. We document the network topology so any engineer can understand it at a glance.

Yes. We follow a structured migration approach: assess (document current state), mobilise (set up landing zone and tooling), migrate (move workloads incrementally using lift-and-shift or re-platforming), and optimise (right-size and modernise post-migration). We always run both environments in parallel during cutover and have a tested rollback plan.

All data at rest is encrypted with KMS-managed keys. Data in transit uses TLS 1.2 or higher. Sensitive parameters are stored in SSM Parameter Store or Secrets Manager. S3 buckets have public access blocked by default with bucket policies enforcing HTTPS-only access. We also enable Amazon Macie to detect unexpected exposure of sensitive data.

We configure CloudWatch metrics, log groups, and alarms for every critical service. We set up X-Ray for distributed tracing and connect it to our preferred observability platform (Datadog or Grafana). We also enable AWS Health events and Trusted Advisor checks so infrastructure issues surface before they become incidents.

Yes. We define your RTO and RPO, then select the appropriate DR strategy: backup-and-restore (lowest cost), pilot light (minimal standby), warm standby, or multi-site active-active. For most SaaS products a warm standby in a second region provides the right balance of cost and recovery speed. We test the failover procedure quarterly.

Yes. We include a structured handover covering the architecture decisions, day-to-day operational tasks, scaling runbooks, and cost management practices. We can also run workshops for your team on the services we deployed. The goal is a team that is self-sufficient, not one that needs to call us every time something changes.