Cloud & DevOps Company in Cambridge

There is no single figure for Cambridge platform work; the range runs from a landing-zone build on AWS or Azure for a Series A to Series B company over six to ten weeks, covering Control Tower or Landing Zones, IAM federation to Entra ID or Okta, baseline monitoring, FinOps tagging strategy, and runbooks, through a Kubernetes platform build (EKS or AKS, ArgoCD GitOps, observability, policy engine) over twelve to twenty weeks, to a bioinformatics or EDA HPC grid on AWS Batch or Azure Batch with Nextflow or LSF integration. Retainer SRE coverage is scoped separately for business-hours or 24x7. Fixed-fee against deliverables, not day rates.

Yes. Cambridge medtech and biotech clients downstream of NHS trusts must hold a satisfactory NHS Data Security and Protection Toolkit (DSPT) submission, and clinical research data flowing through HRA-approved protocols requires UK or EEA hosting under UK GDPR. We architect on AWS eu-west-2 or Azure UK South with Service Control Policies blocking non-UK regions, enable AWS KMS or Azure Key Vault with HSM-backed keys, run DPIAs aligned to ICO guidance, and produce the data flow diagrams the DSPT independent assessor will ask for. For workloads touching Caldicott-principle special category data, we add additional access controls and audit trails that the Caldicott Guardian and your DPO can defend during an information governance review.

Yes. Cambridge fabless semiconductor and IP companies run Synopsys VCS, Cadence Xcelium, Siemens Questa, and synthesis tools on cloud HPC. We design those grids on AWS ParallelCluster or Azure CycleCloud with licence-aware schedulers (IBM Spectrum LSF, Slurm, Altair PBS Pro), FSx for Lustre or Azure NetApp Files for scratch storage, and spot or low-priority fleets to keep per-regression-run economics defensible. ECJU export-control-aware controls pin controlled-technology storage to UK regions, deny replication to non-permitted geographies via SCPs or Azure Policy, and log access with attribution that the ECJU and US BIS reviewers can audit. We also handle licence-server architecture (FlexLM, Reprise) and bursting patterns from on-prem fabs.

We treat FinOps as a first-class deliverable, not an afterthought. From day one we enforce a tagging taxonomy (cost centre, environment, owner, data classification) via SCPs or Azure Policy, route all spend through Cost Anomaly Detection or Azure Cost Management with Slack and email alerts at user-defined thresholds, and produce a monthly unit-cost report (per tenant, per study, per regression run, per inference call depending on workload). Reserved Instances or Savings Plans get modelled quarterly against actual usage; spot or low-priority fleets get used for stateless or interruptible work; idle resource cleanup runs nightly via Lambda or Azure Functions. Cambridge boards see a clear cost-per-customer story, not a 40-page AWS invoice.

Yes. We build EKS, AKS, and self-managed Kubernetes platforms for Cambridge SaaS, medtech, and deep-tech product teams. Defaults include Karpenter autoscaling, Cilium or AWS VPC CNI networking, OPA Gatekeeper or Kyverno admission policies, ArgoCD GitOps deployment, cert-manager and ExternalDNS for ingress, Velero for backup, and a service mesh (Istio, Linkerd) only when traffic patterns actually justify it. Observability uses OpenTelemetry instrumentation feeding Datadog, Grafana Cloud, or Dynatrace; logs flow to Loki or CloudWatch. We avoid platform sprawl: a Cambridge platform team of three should not be operating an Istio mesh, a Kafka cluster, and a self-hosted Prometheus stack on top of their product work.

A typical Cambridge migration runs sixteen to twenty-eight weeks depending on workload count and regulatory scope. Weeks 1 to 4 cover discovery, landing-zone build, and a wave plan. Weeks 5 to 16 cover wave-by-wave migration using AWS Application Migration Service or Azure Migrate, with refactoring of high-value workloads to managed services (RDS, Aurora, Azure SQL, ElastiCache, Service Bus). Weeks 17 to 24 cover cutover, decommissioning, and FinOps optimisation. Workloads under MHRA SaMD scope or NHS DSPT add a regulatory validation phase of four to six weeks for risk classification, DPIA, and information governance review. We do not promise lift-and-shift in 90 days because the regulatory and FinOps cleanup work makes that an empty win.

Both. After the build, we run a 30-day operate-then-handover window where our SREs run the platform with your team shadowing, then your team runs it with us shadowing. After that, you choose: take it fully in-house with our documentation and Slack-channel office hours, or sign a retainer where we cover on-call rotations, capacity planning, postmortems, and quarterly Well-Architected Reviews. Retainer pricing is fixed monthly, scoped to your incident volume and platform footprint, and includes a quarterly DORA report measuring deployment frequency, lead time, change-failure rate, and mean time to recovery against industry benchmarks for your stage.

Most Cambridge clients need UK-only data residency, which means DR runs across two UK Availability Zones within eu-west-2 or UK South, plus a cold standby in eu-west-1 (Ireland) or North Europe (Dublin) when the regulator permits short cross-border replication for backup. We design with a documented RPO and RTO per workload tier, automate failover testing quarterly via AWS Resilience Hub or Azure Site Recovery, and produce DR runbooks the auditor at BSI or LRQA will accept during an ISO 22301 or ISO 27001 Annex A.5.29 assessment. Backups use AWS Backup or Azure Backup with immutable WORM-mode retention to defend against ransomware, and we test full restores rather than relying on green dashboards.