Services / 04
Cloud & platform modernization
Migrate for capability, not for a press release.
Landing zones, migration programmes and platform engineering that reduce unit cost and unblock delivery.
A lift-and-shift that reproduces your data centre in someone else's region is a rent increase, not a modernization. We assess each workload on two axes — the business case for changing it and the technical cost of doing so — and are comfortable recommending that a stable, cheap, boring system stays exactly where it is.
Where migration does make sense, we build the landing zone, the paved-road platform and the guardrails first, so that the tenth team to migrate moves faster than the first. Cost visibility is wired in from the start; FinOps added after the fact almost never sticks.
For clients under regulatory obligations around data residency, resilience or exit planning, we design to those constraints explicitly and produce the evidence pack the regulator will ask for.
Capabilities
Landing zones & guardrails
Multi-account foundations with identity, network segmentation, policy-as-code and audit trails in place before workload one.
Migration programmes
Workload-by-workload assessment, wave planning and execution, with rollback tested rather than assumed.
Platform engineering
Internal developer platforms and paved roads that make the compliant path also the fastest path.
Resilience & FinOps
Failure testing, recovery objectives that have actually been exercised, and unit economics visible per team.
Related insights
Legacy modernization4 min read
The alternative to a big-bang rewrite has had a name for twenty years
Fowler named the pattern after a plant that grows around its host and replaces it in place. Most failed replatforming programmes are ones that ignored it.
Source: Martin Fowler, Strangler Fig Application, martinfowler.com, 2004, rewritten 2024
Operating model5 min read
Conway's Law, turned into something you can actually staff
Four team types and three ways they are allowed to interact. The constraint it optimises for is cognitive load, which is the one nobody budgets for.
Source: Matthew Skelton & Manuel Pais, Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow, IT Revolution, 2019
Operations4 min read
Four pages that should be read before every post-incident review
Cook was writing about medicine. Anyone who has run a production system will recognise all eighteen points immediately.
Source: Richard I. Cook, MD, How Complex Systems Fail, Cognitive Technologies Laboratory, University of Chicago, 1998
Next service
Experience & design
Have a programme that has stalled between slideware and shipping?
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