Frequently Asked Questions

We offer three primary engagement models:

• Assessment & Strategy — We audit your infrastructure, identify gaps, and recommend a roadmap (2-4 weeks)
• Design & Architecture — We design your target-state platform and governance model (2-4 weeks)
• Platform Partnership — Assessment, architecture, build, and enablement with full knowledge transfer (10-16 weeks typical)

Most clients choose Platform Partnership because it ensures your team can maintain and extend what we build. We can also extend engagements for ongoing support or additional services.

We have deep experience with all three major cloud providers:

• AWS — Landing zones, multi-account strategy, IAM, Kubernetes (EKS), compliance frameworks
• Azure — Azure landing zones, management groups, identity, AKS, compliance and governance
• GCP — Resource hierarchies, organization policies, GKE, workload identity, cost optimization

We're cloud-agnostic in our approach but can focus on whichever provider is right for your organization. Many clients work across multiple clouds, and we can design governance and practices that span them.

Security and compliance are woven into every engagement, not bolted on at the end.

• We design identity and access management from day one
• Logging, audit trails, and change tracking are built-in
• We implement guardrails that make secure choices easy and insecure ones hard
• For regulated workloads (HIPAA, PCI, SOC 2), we design with those frameworks in mind

We're not a pure security consulting firm—we're platform engineers who understand security as a foundational capability, not an afterthought. Your team learns why we design things the way we do.

Yes. Kubernetes is a core competency. We work with:

• Managed Kubernetes — EKS, AKS, GKE cluster design, configuration, and operations
• Networking & Service Mesh — CNI selection, service discovery, Istio or Linkerd
• Storage & Persistence — Choosing the right storage classes, database architectures, backup strategies
• Security Policies — RBAC, network policies, workload identity, pod security standards
• Scaling & Performance — Node pools, auto-scaling, resource requests, cost optimization

We don't push Kubernetes on everyone. If your workloads fit better on VMs or container services, we'll recommend that instead. When Kubernetes is the right choice, we design it for your team to maintain.

We're experienced with the major IaC frameworks:

• Terraform — Most common; excellent for multi-cloud and team scale
• AWS CDK — Great for organizations heavily invested in AWS and Python/TypeScript
• Pulumi — Good for teams wanting general-purpose programming languages

The choice depends on your team's skills, cloud providers, and organizational preferences. We'll recommend based on your specific situation, then help you adopt practices that make IaC maintainable: testing, modularity, documentation, and CI/CD.

Observability is core to every engagement. We help you implement:

• Metrics — Prometheus-compatible collection, time-series storage, dashboards
• Logging — Structured logs, aggregation, and analysis (ELK, Splunk, Datadog, etc.)
• Tracing — Distributed tracing to understand request flows across services
• SLOs — Defining, measuring, and tracking service-level objectives aligned to business outcomes

We design observability so your team can trust their systems and detect issues fast. That means meaningful alerts (not alert fatigue), clear ownership, and runbooks your team understands.

Handoff is intentional. By the end of an engagement:

• Your team owns the platform completely
• All architecture decisions are documented
• Operational runbooks are in place
• Your team has practiced incident response

After the formal engagement ends, we typically offer 4-8 weeks of ongoing support for clarifications, refinements, or additional services. Many clients extend engagements for additional platform services or ongoing optimization.

Pricing depends on scope, duration, and complexity. A typical Platform Partnership engagement ranges from $150K to $300K+ depending on:

• Scope (which services, how many teams)
• Current infrastructure complexity
• Timeline and intensity
• Compliance and regulatory requirements

We're transparent about costs upfront. We typically estimate based on time and expertise required, then work on a fixed price or T&M basis. Let's discuss your situation and we can give you a more specific estimate.

A typical Platform Partnership engagement spans 10-16 weeks:

• Weeks 1-2: Assess — Audit, interviews, gap analysis
• Weeks 3-4: Architect — Design target state and detailed roadmap
• Weeks 5-14: Build — Implementation with pairing and knowledge transfer
• Weeks 15-16+: Enable — Training, documentation, operational readiness, handoff

Timelines can flex based on your team's availability, the complexity of your environment, and whether you want to run in parallel or sequence. We'll agree on a timeline upfront.

Documentation and knowledge transfer are intentional from day one:

• Architecture Decision Records — Why we made specific choices
• Runbooks — How to operate, troubleshoot, and respond to incidents
• Code Comments — Infrastructure and application code is well-commented
• Pair Programming — We work alongside your team so knowledge transfers naturally
• Training Sessions — Structured training on architecture, operations, and tools

Your team should be able to own and extend what we build without us. That's the goal.

Absolutely. Accessibility and inclusivity affect platform design in several ways:

• Tooling — We recommend accessible CLI and web tools
• Documentation — Clear, structured documentation that works for everyone
• Error Messages — Clear, actionable error messages and logs
• Onboarding — Making it easy for new team members to learn the platform

We also help you think about your platform's customers' needs—if you serve users with different abilities, your platform and infrastructure should support that from day one.

We stay accessible. After formal engagement, we typically offer:

• Dedicated Slack channel — For questions and clarifications
• Monthly office hours — Q&A sessions with the team
• Support requests — Via our support form for longer-term questions or issues
• Extension services — If you need additional platform work or optimization

This isn't a transactional engagement—we care about your long-term success. You can reach out with questions or ask about additional services.