Cloud-native Microsoft Azure architecture for UK organisations. Greenfield designs, Well-Architected reviews, and platform-engineering blueprints — built around your workloads, your compliance posture, and your cost ceiling.
Most "Azure architecture" deliverables are a Visio diagram and a slide deck. Useful for board approval, useless for the team building it. We deliver designs that an engineering team can pick up and execute against — every component named, sized, networked, secured, monitored, and costed.
Workload understanding. Before we touch a whiteboard we understand what the workload does, who uses it, what its failure modes look like, and what it costs today. Architecture decisions only make sense in that context — choosing AKS over App Service, or Cosmos DB over Postgres, is rarely a defensible call without it.
Five pillars, applied honestly. The Azure Well-Architected Framework — reliability, security, cost optimisation, operational excellence, performance efficiency — is the backbone of every design we produce. We score the proposed design against each pillar and document the trade-offs, not just the highlights.
Identity and network first. The two foundations that are painful to retrofit. We design Entra ID structure, custom domains, conditional access, and PIM up front. Network topology — hub-spoke, Virtual WAN, private endpoints, DNS resolution — is settled before any workload is placed.
Platform engineering. The output is not a single design — it is a reusable platform: a tested landing zone, modular Bicep or Terraform, a deployment pipeline, an inner-loop developer experience, and the documentation needed for your engineers to extend it without our involvement.
Reference architecture diagrams, component-level decisions with rationale, Well-Architected scoring, and a numbered list of trade-offs accepted.
Entra ID structure, conditional access policy set, network topology, DNS plan, and private connectivity model — codified, not hand-waved.
Modular Bicep or Terraform for every component, with environments parameterised. Deployable from day one and maintainable by your team.
Per-component monthly cost estimate, capacity assumptions documented, and an explicit list of cost levers your team can pull as load grows.
The brief. A B2B SaaS product running on a handful of oversized Azure VMs. New enterprise contracts requiring SSO, audit trails, and regional data residency. The team had no platform engineer and no time to become one.
The work. Six weeks of architecture and platform-engineering work. Re-platform onto Azure Kubernetes Service for the application tier, Azure SQL with elastic pools for tenant data, Azure Front Door for global ingress, Entra External ID for SSO. Landing zone built from Cloud Adoption Framework patterns and codified in Bicep with environment-per-tenant overlays.
The result. The team shipped their first enterprise tenant on the new platform inside the engagement window. The Well-Architected reliability score improved across the board — multi-region failover, automated backup verification, and explicit RTO/RPO targets per workload tier. New tenant onboarding moved from a manual checklist to an automated pipeline.
Anonymised illustrative engagement. Numbers reflect typical scope and outcomes for an engagement of this size; specifics vary by environment.
A focused Well-Architected review on an existing workload is typically two to three weeks. A full greenfield architecture plus a deployable landing zone is six to ten weeks. We are happy to scope a smaller advisory engagement if you have an in-house team that just needs a second pair of eyes on a specific decision.
We will tell you when not to. AKS is the right answer for some workloads and an expensive distraction for others. Same with microservices, event-driven patterns, and serverless. We start from your workload's actual access pattern and operational maturity, then choose the simplest service that meets the requirement.
Yes. Most engagements are collaborative — your team owns the long-term architecture and we bring depth on Azure-specific decisions, Well-Architected scoring, and the platform engineering needed to execute. Knowledge transfer is part of every engagement.
We design for the compliance posture you need to maintain. Azure Policy, Microsoft Purview, Defender for Cloud regulatory baselines, and explicit data-residency boundaries are part of the architecture, not bolt-ons. We will not pretend to be your compliance officer, but we will deliver architecture that does not fight the audit.
We start from Microsoft's published reference architectures and the Cloud Adoption Framework where they fit, then adapt to your context. Reinventing the landing zone from scratch is rarely a good use of your money.
That is the test we hold ourselves to. The deliverables are written for your engineers, not for us — diagrams, decision records, infrastructure code, and runbooks. If you cannot extend the design without us, we have failed.
A 30-minute call to scope your workloads and the questions you want answered.
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