Platform, DevEx & DevOps
Make shipping boring — on AWS or GCP, with the bill attributed to someone.
- AWS
- GCP
- Terraform
- Kubernetes
- GitHub Actions
- Timeline
- Baseline in week one; first improvements in weeks
- Engagement
- Fixed-scope project or embedded monthly
- Built for
- Teams where deploying is an event rather than a routine
The problem
Deploys need the one person who knows the trick. Environments take a day to provision. Staging drifted from production two quarters ago. None of this shows up as an incident — it shows up as everything taking longer than it should, and nobody being able to say why.
Who this is for
- Teams where deploying is an event rather than a routine
- Organisations on AWS or GCP with a cloud bill nobody can explain
- Engineering leaders who have to answer for delivery speed
Who this is not for
- Single-application teams a managed platform already serves well
- Cloud migrations undertaken for their own sake
How it runs
- 01
Measure the developer loop
Lead time to production, deploy frequency, change-failure rate and time to restore. Cohort level only — individual developer metrics corrupt the data and the culture at the same time.
- 02
Fix the pipeline first
Build, test and deploy made fast and reproducible. This is where most of the missing time turns out to be hiding.
- 03
Environments as code
Terraform or the platform's own IaC, so standing up an environment is a command rather than a favour someone has to grant.
- 04
Observability and cost attribution
Logs, metrics and traces routed to an owner, and per-service spend attributed to a team. An unattributed cloud bill never goes down.
- 05
Hand over the golden path
Documented, self-service paths so the next service ships without a platform engineer in the loop.
What you get
- Baseline of lead time, deploy frequency, change-failure rate and recovery time
- CI/CD pipeline that is fast and reproducible
- Infrastructure as code for every environment
- Logs, metrics and tracing with alerts that route to an owner
- Cloud spend attributed per service, with budget alerts
- Golden-path documentation and a self-service developer workflow
Platform, DevEx & DevOps: questions we get asked
AWS or GCP — does the choice matter?
Less than how you use either one. The expensive decisions are environment reproducibility, deploy speed and cost attribution, and those are architectural rather than vendor-specific. We work in both, and we do not recommend changing cloud without a reason larger than preference.
How do you measure developer experience?
With the four delivery metrics — lead time for change, deploy frequency, change-failure rate and time to restore — captured at team level before anything changes. Everything after that is measured against the baseline rather than asserted.
Our cloud bill keeps growing. Where do you start?
With attribution. Most teams cannot say what an individual service costs, and spend that belongs to nobody never falls. Once cost is attributed per service with budget alerts, the expensive decisions become visible — and a small number of them usually account for most of the bill.
Do we need Kubernetes?
Probably not yet. Kubernetes earns its operational cost when you run many services with genuinely different scaling profiles. Before that it is a platform team you have to staff in order to solve problems a managed runtime had already solved for you.
Delivered in your region.
- GDPR
- UAE PDPL
- ISO 27001 practices
- Data residency in the EU, the UAE, or your own cloud account
APPINE L.L.C-FZ, Dubai
Related services
$ appine assess --fixed-fee
Two weeks. Fixed fee. You end with a decision, not a deck.
A system and codebase audit, a risk register ranked by severity, an engineering baseline, and an explicit recommendation — keep, harden, rebuild, or don't do it at all.
If the answer is “don't hire us,” we'll write that down too.