Cloud-native development

Services built to run on cloud infrastructure from the first commit, not lifted onto it later.

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What is it?

We design and build applications around the things cloud platforms are actually good at: horizontal scale, managed data services, and deployment that happens many times a day without a maintenance window. The work covers the application itself, the pipeline that ships it, and the infrastructure definition that stands it up.

For a technical reader

Concretely: stateless services behind a load balancer, state pushed into managed backing services, configuration injected at runtime rather than baked into images, and horizontal scale as the default answer to load. Deployments are immutable and rolled forward. The twelve-factor principles still describe most of this well, and the parts they predate — container scheduling, service meshes, managed event buses — follow the same logic of keeping the application free of machine-specific assumptions.

Our services

Greenfield service buildWe design and build new services end to end: domain model, API, storage, deployment pipeline and the infrastructure definition that stands it all up.
Cloud-readiness assessmentAn honest review of an existing application against what cloud platforms reward, with a costed list of what would have to change.
Reference architectureA documented, working pattern your teams copy for the next service, rather than each team inventing its own.
Team enablementPairing and review alongside your engineers, so the patterns stay after we leave.

What’s covered

Containers and orchestration
Kubernetes, ECS or Cloud Run, with the deployment manifests under version control
Managed data services
Postgres, Redis, object storage and queues, run by the provider rather than by you
Event-driven patterns
Pub/sub and message queues where synchronous calls would couple services together
Infrastructure as code
Terraform or CloudFormation, so environments are reproducible rather than hand-built
Progressive delivery
Blue/green and canary releases with automated rollback on error-rate thresholds

Business problems we solve

Releases are an event, not a routineIf shipping requires a change window and a rollback plan written by hand, the deployment path is the bottleneck. We build the pipeline first and make rollback automatic.
Scaling means buying a bigger machineVertical scale runs out and costs disproportionately. Stateless services with managed backing stores scale horizontally and can scale back down.
Environments drift apart"Works in staging" is a symptom of hand-built infrastructure. Everything defined as code means environments are reproducible.
Nobody can explain the architectureDecisions live in people's heads and leave when they do. We write architecture decision records next to the code.

Our delivery approach

  1. 01
    Shape the service boundariesWe map the domain before writing code, so the split between services follows how the business actually works rather than how the current database happens to be organised.
  2. 02
    Build the pipeline firstThe deployment path exists before the first feature does. If you cannot ship a trivial change safely on day one, you will not be able to ship a hard one in month six.
  3. 03
    Build in vertical slicesEach increment goes all the way through: interface, logic, storage, tests, deployed. You see working software early and can change direction while it is still cheap.
  4. 04
    Hand over with the runbookYour team gets the architecture decisions, the operational runbook, and the on-call knowledge, not just repository access.

Solutions & project types

Examples of the work we take on in this area. These describe project shapes, not named client engagements.

Customer-facing portalA self-service portal with authentication, document upload and a case workflow, backed by managed Postgres and object storage.
Internal operations serviceReplacing a spreadsheet-and-email process with a service that holds state, enforces approvals and exposes an API to the rest of the estate.
Event-driven processingIngesting a high-volume feed and processing it asynchronously, with retries and a dead-letter queue, so a spike does not take the system down.
Multi-tenant platformA shared service with per-tenant isolation at the data layer and usage metering.

Technologies & platforms

Runtime

  • Kubernetes
  • AWS ECS
  • Google Cloud Run
  • Azure Container Apps
  • Docker

Languages

  • TypeScript / Node.js
  • Python
  • Java
  • Go

Data

  • PostgreSQL
  • Redis
  • S3 / Object Storage
  • DynamoDB
  • Oracle Autonomous DB

Messaging

  • Kafka
  • SNS / SQS
  • RabbitMQ
  • Google Pub/Sub

Infrastructure

  • Terraform
  • AWS CDK
  • Pulumi
  • Helm

Delivery

  • GitHub Actions
  • GitLab CI
  • Argo CD
  • Datadog
  • OpenTelemetry
Learn this field

Where to start with cloud-native development.

Secondary to the work itself, but genuinely useful if you are building the skill. Every link goes to official documentation or an official channel.

Beginner

  • Learn one language well before learning three
  • Containers: build an image, run it, understand layers
  • HTTP, REST and what a status code actually means
  • Git branching and pull-request workflow
  • Deploy one small app to a managed platform end to end

Intermediate

  • Kubernetes objects: pod, deployment, service, ingress
  • Infrastructure as code with Terraform
  • CI/CD pipelines including automated tests
  • Relational modelling, indexing and query plans
  • Structured logging, metrics and tracing

Advanced

  • Distributed systems failure modes and idempotency
  • Event-driven architecture and exactly-once myths
  • Multi-region resilience and data residency
  • Cost modelling and capacity planning
  • Progressive delivery and automated rollback

Certifications

  • Certified Kubernetes Application Developer (CKAD)
  • Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA)
  • HashiCorp Certified: Terraform Associate
  • AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate
  • Google Associate Cloud Engineer

Practice projects

  • Containerise an existing app and deploy it with a one-command pipeline
  • Add health checks, structured logs and a metrics endpoint, then alert on them
  • Define the whole environment in Terraform and rebuild it from scratch
  • Introduce a queue between two services and handle retries and poison messages
  • Implement blue/green deployment with automatic rollback on error rate
FAQs

Questions we get asked.

Is cloud-native the same as being on the cloud?

No. Running a virtual machine in AWS is being on the cloud. Cloud-native means the application is designed so the platform's scaling, resilience and managed services actually apply to it. A lifted-and-shifted monolith gets the hosting bill without most of the benefit.

Do we have to use Kubernetes?

Often not. Kubernetes is a reasonable answer at a certain scale and team size, and an expensive one below it. Managed container runtimes like Cloud Run or ECS Fargate carry far less operational weight. We recommend based on your team, not on fashion.

How long before we see something working?

We aim for a deployable vertical slice in the first few weeks, including the pipeline. Seeing real software early is what lets you change direction while it is still cheap.

What happens to our existing applications?

They are assessed separately. Some are worth modernising, some are worth leaving alone. See application modernization for how we handle incremental migration.

Can your engineers work inside our team?

Yes. That is a separate engagement shape, covered under specialized talent, and it uses your process and tooling rather than running in parallel.

Engineering

Related services.

Platform engineeringThe internal foundations that let your product teams ship without re-solving infrastructure each time.API & systems integrationMaking systems that were never designed to talk to each other exchange data reliably.Application modernizationMoving legacy applications forward without a rewrite that never lands.Quality & test automationA test suite teams trust enough to deploy on, rather than one they routinely skip.
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