Cloud infrastructure that scales — and deploys your team can trust on a Friday afternoon.

Yes — roughly 35% of our Cloud and DevOps work is built for other agencies and consultancies under NDA. Three partnership models: white-label (your brand, our engineers, fully invisible), agency-of-record (a dedicated platform pod working as your in-house capacity), and capacity overflow (sprint-by-sprint engagement when your team is full). Infrastructure lives in your client’s cloud accounts, defined as code they own. Time zones overlap with the UK, EU, and US workday, and we run inside your tooling as standard.

Our entire engineering team is based in Noida, India — 40 people in our iThum Tower B office, founded in 2015. We work with product teams and agencies across the UK, US, Ireland, Australia, the UAE, Germany, and the Netherlands. Working hours overlap with UK mornings, the full EU workday, and US afternoons — which matters for infrastructure work, where a real-time overlap helps during migrations and deployments. Every engagement has a named project lead as a single point of contact.

For most teams, all three are excellent and the decision should be made on fit, not fashion. AWS has the broadest service range and the deepest ecosystem. Google Cloud is strong on data, analytics, and developer experience. Azure is the natural choice for organisations already invested in the Microsoft ecosystem. The honest truth is that the provider matters far less than how well the infrastructure on it is built. We work across all three and recommend based on your existing tools, your team’s familiarity, and the specific workload — not on a preference.

Cloud and DevOps engagements range from a focused piece of work — a CI/CD pipeline, a cost optimisation pass, an infrastructure audit — through to a full cloud setup or migration. The scope drivers are the size and complexity of the infrastructure, the number of environments and services, the compliance requirements, and whether the engagement is a one-time build or ongoing operations. We scope every engagement against the specific situation, are competitive with established engineering rates internationally, and an infrastructure audit is the lowest-commitment way to get a costed plan.

An infrastructure audit is 2 to 3 weeks. A CI/CD pipeline and observability setup for an existing application is typically 3 to 6 weeks. A full cloud setup with infrastructure as code is 6 to 10 weeks. A cloud migration depends heavily on the size and complexity of the system being moved — usually 8 to 16 weeks — and is always staged so the running system stays live throughout. We work in two-week sprints, and infrastructure work is sequenced so the highest-risk and highest-value pieces are addressed first.

For most new projects, start serverless — it gets you to production fastest with the least to operate, and it costs nothing when idle. Containers earn their place when the workload outgrows what serverless does well: steady high traffic where per-request pricing adds up, long-running processes, persistent connections, or a need for full control. Many mature systems end up using both. We assess the workload and tell you honestly which model fits, and we wrote a full piece on the decision in our journal.

Probably not yet — and we will tell you so honestly. Kubernetes is a brilliant tool for running many services at real scale, and it carries real operational complexity to match. Most teams have a handful of services and modest traffic, and a managed container service or serverless gives them the scaling and reliability they actually want with a fraction of the operational weight. Kubernetes genuinely earns its place when you are running many services at scale and have a team to operate the cluster. Adopting it before then is a recurring tax, not future-proofing.

Infrastructure as code means your whole cloud environment — networking, servers, databases, permissions — is defined in code, typically with Terraform, rather than configured by clicking in a console. It matters because it makes infrastructure reproducible, reviewable, and version-controlled. A new environment becomes a command rather than a week of manual work, changes go through review like any other code, and nothing important lives only in one person’s memory. We build every engagement as infrastructure as code, because click-built infrastructure is a risk the moment the person who built it is unavailable.

Almost always, yes. A first optimisation pass on an unmanaged cloud bill typically removes 20 to 40 percent, with no effect on reliability or performance. The savings come from right-sizing over-provisioned capacity, scaling idle environments down, moving steady baseline load onto committed-use pricing, fixing needless data-transfer charges, and clearing orphaned resources. Just as importantly, we leave behind a budget with alerts, cost-allocation tagging, and a monthly review with a named owner — so the bill stays under control rather than creeping back up after the cleanup.

Yes — this is core Cloud and DevOps work, and it is always staged. Rather than a single risky cutover, we move a system in planned steps: build the new environment as infrastructure as code, replicate data, run the old and new systems in parallel, shift traffic gradually, and keep a tested rollback at every step. The running system stays live throughout, and customers do not see a disruptive switch. The exact approach depends on the application and the database, and we plan it explicitly at the start of the engagement.

Observability is the instrumentation that lets you see how production is really behaving. In practice it is four things: metrics (the numbers — latency, error rates, resource use), logs (the searchable record of what happened), traces (the path of a request through the system), and uptime monitoring with alerting. Together they mean the team sees a problem before customers do, and has the trail to find the cause fast. We set up observability on every engagement, because running infrastructure without it is operating a system you cannot actually see.

Both. Some clients want a setup plus a clean handover — runbooks, dashboards, documentation — so their own team runs it, and we make sure that handover is genuine. Others want us to keep operating the infrastructure through a managed-DevOps retainer covering monitoring and alert response, patching and updates, backup verification, cost review, and a fixed allocation of engineering hours. For a team without a dedicated platform engineer, the retainer is how production stays calm. We are happy with either, and infrastructure is never a setup we walk away from.

Yes. We harden cloud infrastructure as standard — least-privilege access, network isolation, encryption at rest and in transit, managed secrets, and audit logging — and we implement the technical controls behind compliance frameworks such as SOC 2 and ISO 27001. We build these controls into the infrastructure as code rather than bolting them on before an audit, which is both more reliable and far less stressful when the audit comes. We are not a compliance auditor, but we are the engineering team that makes your infrastructure ready to pass one.

By making them small, automated, and reversible. A CI/CD pipeline runs the test suite on every commit, so broken code never reaches production. Staging is genuinely identical to production, so changes are validated before release. Production deploys roll out gradually with a fast, tested rollback, so a problem can be undone in moments. And because deploys become frequent, each one is small — which counter-intuitively makes them safer, since less changes at once. The goal is deploys that are a daily non-event, not a monthly ordeal.