Cloud architecture consulting

What is cloud architecture?

Cloud architecture defines where each workload runs, how traffic reaches it, who can touch it, how its data is stored and protected, and what happens when a component, a zone or a whole region fails. It is the set of decisions the rest of the platform inherits, and the ones that cost the most to change once production traffic depends on them.

The goal is not a perfect diagram. It is a platform that meets the business requirements for availability, latency, security and cost, and that your engineers can operate and extend without calling the original designer. Good architecture is judged by how few surprises it produces over its lifetime, not by how impressive it looks on the day it is presented.

The work takes two forms. A review examines an estate that already runs and says what to keep, what to fix and in which order. A design starts from requirements, for a new product, a hybrid setup or a second region, and produces a target that can be built. Both sit inside our cloud consulting practice, and a design often prepares a planned cloud migration.

Signs you need a cloud architecture review

Architecture problems rarely announce themselves. They show up as long incidents, blocked projects and audits that drag on for months. These are the signals we listen for in a first conversation, because each one points to a different part of the design.

• One zone failure would take production down

  Instances, databases or gateways sit in a single availability zone, and nobody has tested what happens when that zone goes away.

• Recovery objectives exist on paper, never tested

  RTO and RPO figures appear in contracts, yet no restore or failover has been run against them in the last year.

• Every project reopens the network and identity debate

  Without a landing zone and shared conventions, each team designs accounts, subnets and roles from scratch, and differently each time.

• Scaling limits are discovered in production

  Quotas, database connections or a stateful component hit their ceiling during a peak, because nobody wrote the thresholds down.

• The architecture lives in one person’s head

  When the engineer who built it is away, incidents last longer and changes wait. Onboarding depends on oral history.

If two or more of these sound familiar, a review usually costs less than the next serious incident. It also gives you a written baseline before any larger change, such as opening a new region, passing an audit or integrating an acquired company’s systems.

What our architecture engagement covers

Whether we review or design, the deliverables are the same kind of document: decisions with their reasons, diagrams that match what is deployed, and procedures that have been run at least once. We begin with infrastructure mapping of your applications and dependencies, because no design is better than the inventory it starts from.

• Requirements and constraints, written as numbers

  Availability, latency, recovery objectives, data residency and budget, agreed with the business before any option is compared.

• Architecture decision records

  Each significant choice documented with the options considered, the trade-offs accepted and the conditions that would make us revisit it.

• Landing zone and security baseline

  Account or subscription structure, network topology, identity and access, encryption and guardrails, specified so they can be written as infrastructure as code.

• Resilience and disaster recovery design

  Failure modes per component, backup and failover procedures, and a recovery test run against the stated objectives.

• Scalability thresholds and capacity plan

  The known limits of each component, the metrics that warn before they are reached, and the next step when they are.

Everything is written so that your team, or another partner, can implement it. When you want us to build it too, the same consultants carry the design into code, which removes the usual loss between what the architect intended and what actually gets deployed.

How we design: four phases

Each phase produces a document the next one depends on, and each ends with a review where you can change direction. Nothing is designed before the requirements are signed off, and nothing is called finished before it has been tested.

Validation is where many designs fail quietly. We run at least one restore and one failover against the stated recovery objectives, and a load check against the scaling thresholds, before calling the design done. Gaps found there go back into the decision records, not into a footnote. To decide what to watch once the platform is live, our monitoring and alerting plan with calibrated thresholds is a useful starting point.

Single region, multi-region or hybrid?

Topology is the decision with the largest effect on cost and complexity. More regions and more environments buy resilience, but every one of them must be deployed, secured, tested and paid for. We choose the simplest topology that meets the written recovery objectives, and we say what it would take to move up a level.

Multi-cloud is the option we recommend least often, because it doubles the skills and tooling for a benefit few workloads need. When it is the right answer, the reason goes into a decision record. Before committing to any topology, a cloud risk analysis of blockers and critical dependencies shows which constraints are real and which are assumptions.

Architecture risks we design out early

Some architecture risks are visible on day one, others only appear after a year of growth. We treat each of the following as a design requirement with an owner, not as something to fix after the first outage.

• Single points of failure in shared services

  DNS, the identity provider, a shared database or a build runner can take everything down. We list them per workload.

• A blast radius that is too large

  One account, one network or one set of credentials for everything means one mistake reaches everything. Boundaries limit the damage.

• Recovery that depends on the failed component

  Backups kept in the same account, or runbooks hosted on the platform they restore, fail exactly when they are needed.

• Designs that ignore the run cost

  An architecture that meets every requirement but doubles the bill is not finished. Cost is estimated per option, before the decision.

• Drift between the design and what is deployed

  Manual changes pile up until the diagrams lie. Infrastructure as code and periodic reviews keep both in step.

When a review finds these problems in an existing estate, we sequence the fixes by risk removed per week of effort, so the most dangerous gaps close first. Our guide on remediating cloud infrastructure technical debt in phases describes how that plan is built and tracked.

Cloud architecture pricing

Every engagement starts with a diagnosis and ends with a fixed quote. Durations are typical, not promised.

What changes the price: number of workloads and environments, recovery objectives, compliance and data residency constraints, and whether we also build the design.

The quote covers senior consultants only, a defined scope and the deliverables of each phase: decision records, diagrams, the landing zone specification and recovery test results. Cloud provider costs, including any temporary environments created for validation, are billed by the provider and estimated before the work starts.

Cloud architecture FAQ