A product to put into production
The application is ready, but hosting, environments, deployments and monitoring still have to be built.
Expertise
Cloud architecture and DevOps:
deploy, monitor
and control costs.
AWS cloud architecture designed by a certified architect, infrastructure as code with Terraform, Docker containers, continuous integration and deployment, monitoring and cost control. What we describe is what we actually run in production.
deploy.yml1# deploy.yml — illustration2on:3push: { branches: [main] }45jobs:6verify: 'tests · lint · build'7infra: 'terraform plan → apply'8deploy: 'docker · production'9monitor: 'alerts · logs'
⑂ MAIN · DEPLOYED · MONITOREDAWS · TERRAFORM · DOCKER
Situations
What brings a cloud project to us.
Manual, risky deployments
Every release depends on one person and an unwritten procedure. A mistake costs an evening, sometimes an outage.
An infrastructure bill out of control
Costs grow faster than usage, and nobody knows exactly which resource costs what.
Highly variable load
Traffic peaks, live streams or heavy processing: the infrastructure must follow the load without staying oversized the rest of the time.
Scope of work
What we design and operate.
One team for architecture, automation and operations. You can entrust us with all of it or a specific part.
AWS architecture
Service selection, networking, multi-AZ high availability, storage and access rights, designed by an AWS-certified architect.
Infrastructure as code
Environments described with Terraform and versioned: reproducible, reviewed like code and recreatable identically.
CI/CD
Automated tests, builds and deployments on every change, with written deployment procedures.
Monitoring
Error, availability and performance tracking, useful alerts rather than noise, written incident procedures.
Cost control
Sizing based on real load, on-demand infrastructure where usage allows, costs tracked per resource.
Several providers
AWS, Cloudflare or Hetzner depending on latency, cost and data residency needs.
Method
From the existing setup to controlled operations.
- 01
Assess the current state
Existing infrastructure, deployments, costs and past incidents. What works is kept.
- 02
Design the target architecture
Services, environments, security and budget, with the possible options and their consequences.
- 03
Automate
Infrastructure described as code, integration and deployment pipelines, reproducible environments.
- 04
Monitor and hand over
Alerts, dashboards and written operating procedures, handed to the team that runs the product.
Responsibilities
Who decides what.
A typical division of responsibilities, agreed for each engagement.
| Topic | Your team | Black Tide |
|---|---|---|
| Accounts and access | You keep ownership of the cloud accounts | We work with the permissions we need, nothing more |
| Infrastructure budget | You set the envelope | We size resources and flag overruns |
| Production releases | You keep the decision | We automate and support, following your rules |
| Incidents | Your on-call arrangements apply | We step in within the agreed hours and scope |
| Documentation | You host it in your tools | We write deployment and operating procedures |
Selected work
Infrastructure run in production.
Vibly
A backend on AWS Elastic Beanstalk with multi-AZ auto scaling to absorb peaks, S3 for media, and a target infrastructure budget of €3 to €4 per active user per year.
Read the Vibly caseBlisterr
Streaming infrastructure provisioned on demand and sized for each live session: a cost per viewer-hour around six times lower than a fully WebRTC architecture.
Read the Blisterr caseEach case describes the work delivered, its scope and the current status of the product.
Budget and next steps
How a cloud project is priced.
What discovery establishes
The current state, the target architecture, the environments to create and the expected level of monitoring.
What makes up the budget
Architecture and automation days on one side, hosting costs on the other, estimated during discovery and set out in the quote.
Operations and follow-up
Infrastructure monitoring and maintenance are agreed after go-live, with a defined scope.
Join at the stage you need
Infrastructure audit, CI/CD setup, design of a target architecture or taking over operations.
Useful questions
Before a cloud project.
Do you only work on AWS?
AWS is our main platform, backed by the AWS Solutions Architect certification. We also use Cloudflare and Hetzner when cost, latency or data residency justify it.
Do we need Kubernetes?
Rarely at first. Docker containers on managed services are enough for most products and cost less to operate. We choose based on load and the team that will run it.
Who stays in control of the infrastructure?
We recommend that cloud accounts are in your name. Infrastructure as code and its documentation are delivered into your tools; ownership of deliverables is set out in the commercial proposal.
Can you reduce our cloud bill?
We first measure what each resource costs. Levers, from sizing to on-demand provisioning, are costed before being applied, with no promised savings before we have looked.
Next step
Let’s talk about your infrastructure.
Your current hosting, your deployments and what worries you in production: the starting point for a useful assessment.