Cloud Architecture & DevOps Consulting
Scalable, secure, and cost-efficient infrastructure designed by someone who builds on it every day.
Why Cloud Architecture Matters
Your cloud infrastructure is the foundation everything else runs on. A well-architected platform scales smoothly, keeps costs predictable, recovers from failures gracefully, and gives your engineering team the confidence to ship fast. A poorly architected one creates bottlenecks, spiralling costs, late-night incidents, and a team that’s afraid to deploy on Fridays.
The challenge is that cloud architecture decisions made early — which provider, which services, how things connect, how deployments work — compound over time. The quick decisions that got your MVP to market become the constraints that slow you down at scale. And migrating later is always harder and more expensive than building right from the start.
I bring over 15 years of hands-on infrastructure experience — from managing global enterprise systems at Honeywell to building cloud-native platforms from scratch on Kubernetes. I don’t just draw architecture diagrams; I build and operate these systems in production.
Who This Is For
Startups building their first production infrastructure who need to make the right platform decisions from day one without over-engineering or over-spending. I help you choose the right cloud provider, design an architecture that can grow with you, and set up the deployment pipelines that let your team move fast.
Growing companies hitting scaling limits where the initial architecture is creaking under load, costs are climbing faster than revenue, or deployments have become painful and risky. I assess what you have, identify the bottlenecks, and design a migration path that doesn’t require a full rewrite.
Organisations modernising legacy infrastructure moving from on-premises or traditional hosting to cloud-native platforms. I plan and execute migrations that minimise risk and downtime while building toward a modern, maintainable architecture.
Teams that need DevOps maturity but don’t have senior infrastructure expertise in-house. I establish the CI/CD pipelines, monitoring, alerting, and operational practices that let your developers focus on building features instead of fighting infrastructure.
What I Deliver
Cloud Platform Strategy
Choosing the right cloud platform — AWS, GCP, Azure, or Civo — isn’t just a technical decision. It’s a business decision that affects cost structure, hiring, vendor lock-in, and operational complexity for years. I evaluate your specific requirements against each platform’s strengths and help you make an informed choice, including hybrid and multi-cloud strategies where they genuinely make sense (and steering you away when they don’t).
Kubernetes & Container Architecture
Kubernetes is the backbone of modern cloud-native infrastructure, but it’s also complex enough to become a liability if implemented poorly. I design and build Kubernetes architectures that are right-sized for your needs — from managed clusters on EKS, GKE, or Civo K3s to more sophisticated multi-cluster setups for larger organisations. This includes namespace design, resource management, networking, ingress configuration, service mesh evaluation, and the operational tooling that makes Kubernetes manageable day-to-day.
Infrastructure as Code
Manual infrastructure is unreliable infrastructure. I implement Infrastructure as Code using Terraform, Pulumi, or Helm charts that make your entire platform reproducible, version-controlled, and auditable. This means any environment can be rebuilt from scratch, changes are reviewed through pull requests, and your infrastructure has the same development discipline as your application code.
CI/CD Pipeline Design
A well-designed CI/CD pipeline is the difference between deploying with confidence multiple times a day and dreading every release. I build deployment pipelines using GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, ArgoCD, or FluxCD that include automated testing, security scanning, staged rollouts, and easy rollback. The goal is a pipeline where your developers can merge to main and have confidence that their code will reach production safely.
Monitoring, Observability & Alerting
You can’t operate what you can’t see. I implement observability stacks using Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, and OpenTelemetry (or your preferred tools) that give you real-time visibility into application performance, infrastructure health, and business metrics. Alerting is configured to be actionable — no alert fatigue, no 3am pages for non-critical issues — with clear runbooks and escalation paths.
Cost Optimisation
Cloud costs have a way of growing faster than the business. I conduct thorough cost audits that identify waste — oversized instances, idle resources, inefficient storage patterns, missing reserved capacity commitments — and implement changes that typically reduce monthly spend by 20-40% without impacting performance. At Honeywell, I delivered $2M in infrastructure cost savings through exactly this kind of systematic optimisation.
Security & Compliance Architecture
Security is built into the architecture, not bolted on afterward. I design infrastructure with defense in depth — network segmentation, least-privilege access controls, encrypted data at rest and in transit, secrets management, vulnerability scanning in CI/CD, and audit logging. With four consecutive ISO 27001 audits under my belt, I know what auditors look for and how to build systems that pass scrutiny without creating operational friction.
Disaster Recovery & High Availability
Every business has a different tolerance for downtime, and your DR strategy should reflect that reality rather than a theoretical ideal. I design backup strategies, failover architectures, and recovery procedures calibrated to your actual RPO and RTO requirements — and then test them, because an untested DR plan isn’t a plan.
How Engagements Work
Assessment & Discovery — I start by understanding your current infrastructure, pain points, and business objectives. This includes reviewing your architecture, talking to your engineering team, analysing costs, and identifying the highest-impact areas for improvement.
Architecture Design — Based on the assessment, I design a target architecture with a clear migration path. This isn’t a theoretical whiteboard exercise — it’s a practical design that accounts for your team’s skills, your timeline, and your budget.
Implementation — I build alongside your team, writing the Terraform, configuring the clusters, setting up the pipelines, and establishing the operational practices. Knowledge transfer happens throughout — your team learns by doing, not by reading documentation after the fact.
Operational Handover — Everything is documented, automated, and tested. Your team has the knowledge and tooling to operate and evolve the infrastructure independently. I’m available for ongoing advisory if needed, but the goal is always to build your team’s capability, not create dependency.
Technology Stack
I work across the full cloud infrastructure landscape, selecting the right tools for each specific situation: cloud platforms including AWS, GCP, Azure, and Civo; container orchestration with Kubernetes, Docker, and Helm; Infrastructure as Code using Terraform, Pulumi, and CloudFormation; CI/CD through GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, ArgoCD, and FluxCD; monitoring and observability with Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, and OpenTelemetry; ingress and networking using Traefik, Nginx, Istio, and Cilium; secrets management via HashiCorp Vault, AWS Secrets Manager, and sealed-secrets; and databases spanning PostgreSQL, Redis, MongoDB, and managed database services.
Why Choose Selbytech?
Practitioner, not just architect — I operate production Kubernetes clusters daily. The architecture I design is informed by real operational experience, not just theoretical best practices.
Business-aware engineering — Infrastructure decisions are business decisions. I optimise for the right balance of reliability, cost, and development velocity for your specific stage and constraints.
Full-stack perspective — As a fractional CTO, I understand how infrastructure decisions impact application architecture, team productivity, security posture, and business outcomes. I don’t optimise infrastructure in isolation.
Proven financial impact — $2M in infrastructure cost savings at Honeywell, production Kubernetes platforms built from scratch, and systems that handle real traffic without drama.
Frequently Asked Questions
Which cloud provider should we use?
It depends on your specific requirements, team expertise, and budget. AWS has the broadest service catalogue, GCP excels at data and ML workloads, Azure integrates well with Microsoft ecosystems, and Civo offers excellent Kubernetes-native hosting at competitive prices. I’ll help you evaluate the trade-offs for your specific situation rather than defaulting to whatever is most popular.
Do we really need Kubernetes?
Not always. Kubernetes is powerful but adds operational complexity. For smaller applications, managed services like AWS Fargate, Google Cloud Run, or even well-configured VMs might be more appropriate. I’ll recommend the simplest architecture that meets your actual requirements — including Kubernetes when the complexity is justified by the benefits.
How do you handle the migration without downtime?
Through careful planning, staged migration, and parallel running. I design migration paths that move workloads incrementally, with rollback plans at every stage. Critical services get blue-green or canary deployments. The goal is zero-downtime migration, and the planning to achieve that starts before any infrastructure changes begin.
Can you work with our existing team?
Absolutely. I typically work embedded with your engineering team, pair-programming on infrastructure code, reviewing pull requests, and mentoring on cloud-native practices. The goal is always to build your team’s capability alongside improving the infrastructure.
How does this fit with fractional CTO services?
Cloud architecture and DevOps are core components of most fractional CTO engagements. For companies that specifically need infrastructure expertise without broader CTO services, standalone cloud consulting engagements are available. See our fractional CTO services and pricing for options.
Ready to build infrastructure that scales with your business?