Amazon Web Services

How we use it

AWS is our default cloud for most UK estates. We design multi-AZ layouts for availability and prefer managed services (ECS, RDS, ElastiCache) so you are not patching databases at midnight.

Services we usually land

EC2 & ECS — compute and container hosting
RDS — managed PostgreSQL and Aurora
S3 — objects, backups, static assets
CloudFront — CDN where it earns its keep
Lambda — event-driven glue, not a second monolith
VPC — isolation and network boundaries

Typical patterns

Multi-AZ — automatic failover for the path that cannot go down
Managed databases — Aurora or RDS with backups and read replicas when needed
Auto-scaling — scale on real metrics, not hope
Disaster recovery — cross-region backups and a tested restore path
Log analytics — S3 + Athena (or equivalent) for historical queries

Our standards on AWS

Infrastructure in Terraform. Workloads containerised on ECS or EKS. Managed databases with automated backups. Cost visibility from day one. Multi-AZ by default, designed to a 99.99% uptime target for the platforms we hand over.

Right-sizing, reserved capacity for baseline, and spot for burst typically bring estates in well under the old on-premise bill — we show the model before you commit.

Related services

Cloud Migration — move production onto AWS without planned downtime
Kubernetes & DevOps — ongoing platform and cost work

FAQs

Q: How do you keep costs under control? Right-size first. Reserved for predictable baseline, spot for overflow that can die. Review usage on a schedule, not once at go-live.

Q: What about security? Security groups, least-privilege IAM, encryption in transit and at rest, flow logs where useful, and reviews. Compliance (SOC 2, PCI, GDPR, and so on) is mapped to controls and written down — not waved at.

Q: Does AWS cover our compliance needs? AWS holds the certifications; you still have to configure and evidence your use of the services. We set that up and document it for auditors.