Cloud infrastructure and DevOps services on AWS that stay up.

Cloud infrastructure for a PixelForce-built platform carries two separate costs: what PixelForce charges to design, build and run the infrastructure, and what AWS bills you directly for the capacity your platform consumes.

There are two separate numbers here and it helps to keep them apart.

The first is what PixelForce charges to design, build and run the infrastructure. That work starts with Phase 1 Scoping & Design, typically $35,000 to $65,000, which produces the architecture, the Product Requirements Document and a fixed-cost Statement of Work. The build runs as Phase 2 Development, QA and Release, typically $100,000 to $350,000 depending on what is being built, where $350,000 is a recommendation rather than a ceiling. After launch you engage Phase 3, either Option 1 Warranty, Monitoring & Support at $4,000 per month, or Option 2 the Product Retainer priced per four-week cycle from Steady $10,000 to Momentum $50,000, with Enterprise on application. Every figure is an envelope shaped by scope, never a fixed quote - which is exactly why Scoping & Design comes first and why no development quote is issued without it.

The second number is what AWS charges you directly for the compute, storage, database and bandwidth your platform consumes. That is billed by AWS to your own AWS account, it varies enormously with traffic and data volume, and AWS changes its rates regularly, so we do not publish figures for it. Model it with the AWS Pricing Calculator and we will size it properly during Scoping & Design. Reducing that second number is often where the fastest return sits: we reduced a client's cloud hosting costs by over 50 percent, saving them more than $10,000 every month.

AWS, Google Cloud and Azure are all capable platforms, and the honest answer is that the right one depends on where your team, your data and your existing commitments already sit.

We recommend AWS by default because that is where our depth is. PixelForce is an AWS Advanced Tier Partner with 15+ AWS-accredited engineers, which gives a project direct access to AWS architectural review, partner programmes and escalation rather than a general support queue. Across 100+ shipped products we hold 99.99 percent uptime on that stack, and the engineers who design your architecture are the same people who run it afterwards.

We also work with Google Cloud and Azure where a client has existing enterprise commitments, a data-residency requirement, or needs a specific managed service that only one provider offers. Infrastructure as code keeps most of an architecture portable, so the decision is not irreversible - but it is worth making deliberately in Phase 1 rather than inheriting whatever the previous developer happened to use.

Yes, PixelForce migrates existing infrastructure to AWS, and the common moves are on-premises servers, Heroku or DigitalOcean, one cloud provider to another, and legacy managed hosting, each scoped in Phase 1 before any quote.

Yes. The migrations we see most often are on-premises servers to AWS, Heroku or DigitalOcean to AWS once hosting costs have outgrown the platform, one cloud provider to another, and legacy managed hosting to modern cloud infrastructure.

The approach is the same each time. Assess what is genuinely running today, including the parts nobody documented. Choose between lift-and-shift and re-architecture with the trade-offs written down using the 1-3-1 method - one problem, three options, one recommendation. Stand up a parallel environment, plan the data migration, migrate in stages with a rollback path at every step, test and validate, then cut over with the smallest downtime window the business can live with.

Timeline and cost are set by what is being moved: how many services, how much data, how much of the current setup is documented, and how much downtime is acceptable. Both are scoped in Phase 1 Scoping & Design rather than quoted off a rate card. iAppraise is a representative outcome - chronic slowdowns and 500 errors at peak demand despite robust server specs, moved to an AWS Auto-Scaling Group with CI/CD pipelines and Secrets Manager, and it now rides traffic spikes with zero degradation and pays only for the capacity it uses.

CI/CD stands for continuous integration and continuous deployment. It is the automated pipeline that builds your code, runs the test suite against every commit, and deploys the result to staging and then production without anyone manually copying files onto a server.

Without it, a release is a manual event. It takes hours, it happens rarely because it is risky, defects reach production because nothing tested the change, and rolling back means performing the whole process again in reverse under pressure. With it, every commit is tested, a deployment takes minutes, you can ship several times a day, and a bad release can be reverted automatically when health checks fail.

The commercial effect is simple: a critical bug fix reaches your users the same day instead of waiting for the next release window, and your developers spend their time building features rather than shepherding deployments. We build CI/CD into every platform we run - it sits inside the Phase 2 infrastructure milestone, not as an optional extra bought later.

99.99 percent uptime is the figure PixelForce holds across 100+ shipped products, and it comes from architecture rather than luck.

The components are redundancy across multiple availability zones so no single failure takes the platform down, load balancers spreading traffic across instances, auto-scaling groups that replace a failed instance automatically, health checks that detect a problem before users report it, database replication, automated failover, 24/7 infrastructure monitoring with proactive alerts, and a post-incident review after anything that does go wrong so the same failure does not recur.

It is worth being honest about the trade-off. That level of redundancy costs more to run than a single-server setup, and for plenty of platforms a lower availability target is the better commercial decision. What matters is choosing the target deliberately, sizing the architecture to it, and monitoring against it, rather than discovering during an outage that nobody ever decided. That decision is settled in Scoping & Design and reported against monthly in the Platform Health Report.

When traffic to a properly auto-scaled AWS platform spikes ten times over, the infrastructure adds capacity by itself, keeps responding, then removes the extra capacity once the spike passes, with nobody awake to intervene.

With auto-scaling configured properly, the infrastructure adds capacity on its own. New instances come up, the load balancer starts routing to them, the application keeps responding, and when the spike passes the extra capacity is removed again so you are not paying for it. Nobody has to be awake for it to work.

Without auto-scaling, the same spike lands on a fixed set of servers. Response times climb, requests begin timing out, and in the worst case the platform goes down during exactly the moment of attention you spent money to create.

iAppraise is the clearest example in our portfolio. It suffered chronic slowdowns and 500 errors at peak demand despite robust server specs. We fixed the process and file-descriptor bottlenecks, moved the platform to an AWS Auto-Scaling Group with CI/CD pipelines and Secrets Manager, and it now rides traffic spikes with zero degradation, pays only for the capacity it uses, and the team builds features instead of firefighting infrastructure.

Yes, PixelForce provides 24/7 infrastructure monitoring with proactive alerts through Phase 3 Post Launch Support, engaged either as Option 1 Warranty, Monitoring and Support at $4,000 per month or as Option 2 the Product Retainer.

Yes, through Phase 3 Post Launch Support, and there are two ways to engage.

Option 1, Warranty, Monitoring & Support, is $4,000 per month. It covers 24/7 infrastructure monitoring with proactive alerts, critical defects fixed under warranty terms, business-hours response to outages, clear notice of required third-party updates with the cost implications upfront, and a monthly JSM portal review and Platform Health Report. Technical support for customer ticket investigation is capped at seven hours per month. For a live platform that is stable but not actively changing, this is usually the right product.

Option 2, the Product Retainer, includes everything in Option 1 and adds a product roadmap workshop in month one, continuous sprints delivering designed features into production, sprint planning per cycle, and quarterly business reviews. It is priced per four-week cycle against a committed story-point capacity: Steady $10,000, Growth $20,000, Scale $30,000, Velocity $40,000, Momentum $50,000, Enterprise on application.

Yes, PixelForce optimises AWS costs on platforms it did not originally build, and on an existing account it is frequently the fastest return available: one client saved more than $10,000 every month.

Yes, and on an existing platform it is often the fastest return available. We reduced a client's cloud hosting costs by over 50 percent, saving them more than $10,000 every month. Through infrastructure optimisation we decreased a client's per-user cloud costs by 60 percent, and our rescue work routinely cuts server costs 30 to 50 percent.

The levers are consistent: right-sizing instances provisioned for a peak that never arrives, committing to reserved capacity where the workload is predictable and using spot capacity where it is fault-tolerant, auto-scaling so idle capacity is not paid for overnight, storage lifecycle policies moving cold data to cheaper tiers, database and query optimisation so a smaller instance does the same work, and CDN caching to cut bandwidth. Current reserved and spot rates are published by AWS and change regularly, so check the AWS pricing pages for today's numbers.

Sometimes the largest saving is in the application rather than the account. For Move With Us we refactored the user program engine from duplicated per-user data to templates: the core workout table shrank from 42GB to 0.9GB, 98 percent smaller, database CPU peaks fell from 40 percent to under 5 percent, and programming changes now reach users instantly with no workout reboot.

Cloud infrastructure is what your platform runs on - the compute, databases, storage, networking and security that a provider such as AWS supplies and that somebody has to design, provision, secure and pay for.

DevOps is the practice of running and changing that infrastructure safely. It covers automating provisioning through infrastructure as code, building and testing every change through a CI/CD pipeline, instrumenting and monitoring what is deployed, and treating the operational health of the platform as part of the development work rather than as somebody else's problem after launch.

The two are bought together because either one without the other fails predictably. Well-designed infrastructure that only one person knows how to change becomes a bottleneck the moment that person is on leave. A good deployment pipeline pointed at a fragile architecture simply deploys outages faster. Every platform PixelForce builds gets both, and the same in-house Adelaide team owns them.

You own the AWS account and the infrastructure PixelForce builds in it, because client intellectual property is hosted on the client's own AWS account and transfers to you on full payment under the Services Agreement.

You do. Client IP is hosted on the client's own AWS account, and intellectual property transfers to you on full payment under the Services Agreement. The account, the infrastructure defined in code, the data and the deployment pipeline are yours rather than rented from us.

This matters most on the day you want to change the arrangement - bring the work in-house, hand it to another team, or renegotiate. There is nothing to extract and nothing held hostage, because everything already lives in your account and in your repository.

It also means the AWS bill comes to you directly from AWS rather than being resold at a margin. That is deliberate: it removes any incentive for us to leave money on the table during cost optimisation, because the saving is entirely yours.

Infrastructure as code means the servers, networks, databases, permissions and scaling rules that make up your platform are defined in version-controlled files rather than clicked together by hand in a web console. Yes, we use it on every platform we run.

The reason it matters commercially is repeatability. A staging environment can be created that genuinely matches production, so testing means something. A change can be reviewed before it is applied rather than discovered afterwards. An accidental change can be reverted. The entire environment can be rebuilt from source if it ever has to be.

It is also the main defence against the single most common risk we find when taking over someone else's infrastructure: an environment that exists only in the memory of a developer who has since moved on, where nobody can safely change anything because nobody is certain what would break.

A PixelForce cloud infrastructure or DevOps engagement starts with a free consultation under a mutual NDA, produces a 1-3-1 recommendation, and proceeds to Phase 1 Scoping and Design before any build is quoted.

Book a free consultation. It opens with a mutual NDA, then a conversation about what you are running today, what is hurting - cost, reliability, release speed, security, or all four - and what the platform has to support over the next 12 to 24 months.

You leave with a 1-3-1 recommendation: one problem, three options with their trade-offs, and one recommendation across budget, timeline and scope. If the work proceeds, Phase 1 Scoping & Design produces the architecture, the Product Requirements Document and a fixed-cost Statement of Work before any build is quoted. No Blueprint, no Build.

If the honest answer is that your current setup is adequate and the money is better spent elsewhere, we will say so. Declining work, or recommending against a rebuild, is a valid outcome here and has been across 100+ shipped products.

Choose a cloud infrastructure and DevOps company on evidence of running live platforms rather than on certifications alone. Ask which partner tier the company holds, how many accredited engineers sit behind it, and check the claim against the cloud provider's own partner directory.

Four questions separate a genuine operator from a reseller. First, ask who owns the cloud account: your infrastructure should live in your account and be billed to you directly by the provider rather than resold to you at a margin. Second, ask whether the infrastructure is defined as code, and ask to see how a change is reviewed and reverted, because an environment that exists only in one person's memory is a liability you inherit. Third, ask what happens at three in the morning: who is paged, what the response commitment is, and what the monthly report actually contains. Fourth, ask for a cost optimisation example with the before and after numbers attached.

A good answer names the trade-off rather than agreeing with you. Higher availability costs more to run, and a provider who accepts every target without discussing what it costs has not sized the architecture to it. Ask what they would recommend against building, and why.