01
The challenge
The platform had grown faster than its infrastructure. Deployments were manual and succeeded about 70% of the time, environments were inconsistent, scaling policies were ad hoc, and monthly AWS spend was rising 40% month on month. The engineering team was blocked by infrastructure rather than enabled by it.
02
Solution architecture
Request path in teal. Dashed lines are private connectivity, deployment and telemetry. Scroll sideways on small screens.
Layers top to bottom. Controls apply at every layer.
03
Approach
- 01Assess current spend, workload shapes and failure modes before designing anything.
- 02Standardise on EKS with a single, reproducible cluster definition in Terraform.
- 03Move delivery to GitOps with Argo CD so every environment is declared, reviewed and reconciled.
- 04Right-size with resource requests, limits and autoscaling driven by measured usage, not guesses.
- 05Migrate workloads incrementally behind existing load balancers so users never noticed.
04
How the delivery ran
- Week 1–2: assessment, cost baseline, target architecture agreed in writing.
- Week 3–5: EKS platform, Terraform modules and Argo CD bootstrapped in the client's accounts and repositories.
- Week 6–7: workload migration service by service, each with a rollback path.
- Week 8: validation against the agreed requirements, runbooks, recorded hand-over. 30 days of support followed.
05
What was delivered
- EKS platform and Terraform module library in the client's repositories
- Argo CD GitOps repository structure and environment promotion flow
- Autoscaling, quota and cost-control configuration
- Runbooks for deploy, rollback, upgrade and incident response
06
Results
| Dimension | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Cloud spend | Rising 40% month on month | 60% lower, stable |
| Deployment success | ~70%, manual | 95%, automated |
| Deployment time | 45 minutes with intervention | 5 minutes, hands-off |
| Unplanned downtime | Recurring | None in the 6 months after go-live |
| Ownership | Tribal knowledge | Declared in Git, documented, operated by the team |
Facing a similar decision? A 30-minute call is the fastest way to find out whether the same approach fits.
Book a 30-minute callMore case studies
More platforms delivered.
Food & Wellness · E-commerce · Azure
The Azure platform behind a high-volume digital meal-plan experience, run as code.
PractiCal sells personalised meal plans across the UAE through a Next.js storefront, Laravel/PHP backend services and Azure serverless workloads. I owned the cloud and application platform end to end: infrastructure, edge security, CI/CD and production operations across development, staging and production.
AzureLaravelPHPNext.jsRead the case studyB2B Software · Kubernetes
Observability and SLOs that cut detection time from 90 minutes to 5 and freed a fifth of engineering time.
A six-person team ran production with no visibility: incidents took hours to detect and 40% of engineering time went to firefighting. I built the observability stack, defined SLOs and burn-rate alerting, and wrote the runbooks. Detection fell to 5 minutes and the team got 20% of its time back.
KubernetesPrometheusGrafanaOpenTelemetryRead the case studyGovernment · Tourism · Azure
A secure Azure platform for a national tourism digital ecosystem, delivered as code.
A high-traffic tourism ecosystem built on Sitecore, .NET and Optimizely needed standardised, observable and resilient infrastructure across development, UAT and production. I owned cloud architecture, security, networking, CI/CD and production application delivery as Cloud Solution Architect and DevOps Engineer.
AzureSitecore.NETOptimizelyRead the case study