Cloud, DevOps & Platform Engineering

Azure is the default for our regulated industry and government clients — most operate in an identity, productivity, and partnership relationship with Microsoft, and the residency story across Azure regions is well-suited to Gulf-region government work. AWS is more common in our North American programmes, AI/ML-heavy workloads, and event-driven architectures. We have shipped both at production scale; the choice is rarely technical.

Less often, but yes — usually for ML/AI workloads where Vertex AI is the right tool, or for clients with an existing GCP estate. For most regulated enterprise work we engage with, the procurement and partnership story leans toward Azure or AWS.

Use a managed cluster (AKS, EKS, GKE, or OpenShift), and treat Kubernetes as platform infrastructure, not a per-team responsibility. Most enterprise Kubernetes failures we have seen come from teams being asked to operate a cluster they did not have the capacity to operate. We design the cluster, the GitOps deployment topology, observability, identity, and the operating model — then transfer the operating model to a platform team that can run it. Application teams should not be cluster operators.

Event-driven, bursty, low-state workloads with clear bounded contexts: serverless wins. Predictable, long-running, stateful, or latency-sensitive workloads: containers usually win. The honest answer is most enterprise applications need both, and the right architecture mixes them per workload rather than choosing one for the entire estate.

Built in from the start, not bolted on at the quarterly cost-review meeting. Tagging strategy, reserved-capacity and savings-plan modelling, right-sizing audits, observability of cost per workload, and the operating model for cost ownership are part of the delivery. The single most common cloud cost surprise is data egress; we design for it explicitly.

Yes — managed services is the natural extension of cloud engineering. SLA-tiered support, on-call rotation, incident response, change management, continuous enhancement. We have clients we have built platforms for and operated for years afterwards, and clients who took the platform internal at handover. Both are valid; we design for either.