Cloud and DevOps
Deployments that stop being an event
In a lot of companies, going live means one person staying late, copying files over, and hoping. There is no way back if it breaks, and the first sign of trouble is a customer phoning in. We replace that with a pipeline anyone on the team can run, a backup that has actually been restored, and an alert that reaches you before your users do.
- Written runbooks, so the knowledge is not in one head
- Restores tested, not just backups scheduled
- Your cloud account stays yours, in your name
The problem
Three habits that work fine until the day they do not
None of these are unusual. They are what happens when a product grows faster than the process around it, and every one of them is fixable in weeks rather than months.
Deployment lives in one person’s head
There is a sequence of steps that only one engineer knows, partly documented in a chat message from last year. When that person is on leave, releases stop. When they resign, releases become dangerous.
There is no way back
A bad release cannot be undone, only patched forward under pressure at the worst possible hour. And the backup nobody has ever restored is not a backup. It is a file of unknown quality.
You find out from a customer
The site was down for forty minutes and the first anyone knew was a complaint. Without monitoring, outage length is decided by how quickly somebody happens to notice.
What you receive
Infrastructure your own team can operate after we leave
Cloud setup or migration
AWS or Azure, set up in your own account under your billing, with separate environments for staging and production, sensible network rules, and access granted per person rather than one shared root login.
Containers
The application packaged so it runs the same on a laptop, on staging and in production. This removes the entire class of problem that begins with the phrase it works on my machine.
Build and deploy pipelines
Push to a branch, tests run, the build is produced, and it goes out. GitHub Actions, GitLab CI or Azure DevOps depending on where your code already lives. Deploying becomes a button, not an evening.
Monitoring and alerting
Uptime, error rates, response times, disk and memory, and certificate expiry. Alerts go to a channel your team reads, with thresholds tuned so they mean something rather than being ignored.
Backups and recovery
Automated backups held off the main server, with retention you choose, plus a documented restore procedure that we run in front of you at least once so you know the time it takes.
Cost review
A line by line look at the bill. Oversized instances, forgotten volumes, snapshots from two years ago, traffic routed the expensive way. Most first reviews find something worth removing.
How it runs
Four phases, and nothing moves until the way back is proven
Assessment, week 1
What is running, where, on whose account, and who has the keys. How a release happens today. What the last outage looked like. You get a written picture of the current state, which for some clients is the most useful part of the whole engagement.
Foundations, weeks 2 to 4
Environments separated, access tidied, backups running and a restore tested. Boring, and it is the part that decides whether a bad week becomes a bad quarter.
Automation, weeks 4 to 8
Containers, pipelines, staging that mirrors production, and monitoring switched on. We deploy alongside your team until they are doing it and we are watching, rather than the other way round.
Handover and runbooks
Written procedures for deploying, rolling back, restoring, rotating credentials and adding a new engineer. Short documents meant to be used at 3am by somebody who did not build it.
Worth knowing
Four opinions we will repeat until somebody argues us out of them
These come up in almost every first conversation, and they save clients real money.
Cloud is not automatically cheaper
Rented compute beats owned hardware when load moves around and you need to grow quickly. For a steady internal application, a well run server can cost less. The honest answer depends on your traffic shape, and we will work it out with you rather than assume.
A backup you have never restored is a guess
Most backup failures are discovered during the emergency, not before it. The only meaningful test is restoring to a clean environment and confirming the application actually starts. It takes an afternoon and it should be on the calendar.
Most teams do not need Kubernetes
It solves real problems at real scale, and it brings a permanent operational cost that a small team will feel every week. If two containers on a managed service will do, we will recommend that and say so plainly.
The bill is a design decision
Cloud spend is not a fixed rate you accept. It is the direct result of choices about instance size, storage class, data transfer and what stays running overnight. Those choices are worth revisiting every quarter.
Questions
What clients ask before starting
How much does this cost?
A setup project, covering assessment, environments, pipelines, monitoring and backups, typically runs 350,000 to 1,200,000 PKR depending on how many services are involved. Ongoing support is usually a monthly retainer. Cloud fees are billed by AWS or Azure directly to your account, never marked up through us.
AWS, Azure or local hosting?
If your customers and data are all in Pakistan and load is predictable, local hosting is often cheaper and the support is in your timezone. If you need to scale quickly, run globally, or want managed databases and queues, AWS or Azure earns its price. We will give you the comparison for your case.
Can you take over infrastructure somebody else built?
Yes. It starts with an assessment, because inherited setups usually hold at least one surprise. We document what exists before changing anything, and we never delete something simply because we do not yet understand it.
Do we lose access to our own servers?
No. Accounts are created in your company name with your billing details, and you hold the root credentials throughout. Our access is a separate user you can revoke at any time without anything breaking.
Do you provide ongoing support?
Yes, on a monthly arrangement with agreed response times. Plenty of clients take the setup, run it themselves, and call us only when something changes. Both are fine, and the runbooks make the second option realistic.
Start here
Tell us how a release happens today
Who does it, what steps they follow, and what happened the last time it went wrong. That is usually enough for us to say where the risk actually sits and what it would take to remove it.