AWS Cloud Development Services

What our AWS cloud development covers

Choosing the right compute on AWS

Security foundations we set up

• Multi-account structure with AWS Organizations and Control Tower
• IAM roles with least privilege and single sign-on
• Encryption with KMS, secrets in Secrets Manager
• CloudTrail, GuardDuty and Security Hub enabled
• Private networking, WAF and DDoS protection where needed
• Automated backups and cross-region recovery for critical data

Infrastructure as code

Everything we build on AWS is defined in Terraform or AWS CDK and deployed through CI/CD pipelines. Environments are reproducible, changes are reviewed like code, and you can rebuild the whole stack if you ever need to.

A reference architecture for a typical web product on AWS

For many SaaS and web products, a proven starting point looks like this: static assets and the front end served through CloudFront; the application running in containers on ECS Fargate behind an Application Load Balancer, or as Lambda functions behind API Gateway; data in Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL with automated backups and a read replica if needed; ElastiCache Redis for sessions and caching; S3 for file storage with lifecycle rules; SQS queues for background jobs; and SES for transactional email.

Security sits around the whole stack: private subnets for databases, IAM roles instead of long-lived keys, secrets in Secrets Manager, WAF rules on public endpoints and CloudTrail logging to a separate account. Monitoring uses CloudWatch dashboards and alarms, with tracing through X-Ray or OpenTelemetry. This architecture scales from the first customer to substantial traffic with few changes, and every piece is defined in Terraform or CDK.

Well-Architected reviews

If you already run on AWS, a Well-Architected review is a structured way to find risks and savings. We assess your workloads against AWS’s six pillars — operational excellence, security, reliability, performance efficiency, cost optimisation and sustainability — and deliver a prioritised list of improvements with effort estimates. Typical findings include missing backups or multi-AZ setups, overly broad IAM permissions, unencrypted resources and over-provisioned instances.

A landing zone, explained

Before running production workloads, we set up a landing zone: a structure of AWS accounts with security and governance built in. Typically this uses AWS Organizations and IAM Identity Center with separate accounts for production, staging, shared services, logging and security. Centralised CloudTrail logs, AWS Config rules and GuardDuty give visibility across every account from day one.

Choosing data services on AWS

Our AWS delivery approach

1. Assess1–2 weeks

   Review requirements or the existing account: security, architecture, costs and reliability.

2. Design1–2 weeks

   Architecture diagram, account structure and cost estimate agreed with you.

3. Foundations1–3 weeks

   Landing zone, networking, identity and CI/CD defined in Terraform or AWS CDK.

4. Build and deploy

   Application services delivered sprint by sprint into staging, then production.

5. Operate

   Monitoring, alerts, backups, patching and monthly cost reviews.

Reliability and disaster recovery

Reliability starts with deploying across multiple Availability Zones, health checks and automatic replacement of failed instances or containers. Disaster recovery depends on how long you can be down and how much data you can lose. We agree recovery time and recovery point objectives with you, then choose a matching approach.

Indicative only — actual recovery times depend on your system and are proven by testing.

Whatever the strategy, restores are tested on a schedule — an untested backup is only a hope.

Questions to ask before an AWS project

• Who will own the AWS accounts and root credentials?
• What recovery time and data-loss limits does the business accept?
• Which compliance requirements apply, and in which regions must data stay?
• How will costs be tagged and reported by product or team?
• Who is on call once the system is live?

See also infrastructure as code, DevOps consulting and hire AWS developers.

Observability on AWS

You cannot run what you cannot see. We set up CloudWatch metrics, logs and alarms for every service, structured application logging, and distributed tracing with AWS X-Ray or OpenTelemetry. Dashboards show the health of the system from the user’s point of view — error rates, response times and queue depths — rather than only server CPU.

• Alarms routed to the on-call channel with clear runbooks
• Log retention policies that balance investigation needs and cost
• Synthetic checks that test key user journeys every few minutes
• Monthly reports combining reliability, security findings and cost

Typical AWS engagement shapes

Typical durations; scope decides the actual timeline.

Security reviews we run on existing accounts

• Root account protected with MFA and not used day to day
• No long-lived access keys for people; roles and SSO instead
• S3 buckets checked for public access and encryption
• Security groups reviewed for open administrative ports
• CloudTrail, GuardDuty and Config enabled in every region in use
• Findings prioritised by risk with a fix plan

Each review ends with a short written report: what is in good shape, what needs attention first, the estimated effort to fix it and, where useful, quick wins that reduce cost without affecting reliability.

Cost control

We tag resources, set budgets and alerts, and review spend monthly. Common savings come from right-sizing instances, Savings Plans, S3 lifecycle rules and switching idle workloads to serverless. Moving to AWS from elsewhere? See cloud migration. Need AWS engineers in your own team? See IT staff augmentation.

This page is part of Cloud & DevOps Services — see the full overview for related services, approach and pricing.