Insights

Cloud engineering thoughts, guides, and lessons learned

Case Study

How We Built This Website: Architecture, Security, and Cost

We practice what we preach. This website is built and deployed using the same principles, tools, and frameworks we recommend to our clients. Here’s a complete breakdown of how kaizenconsultancy.io is architected, secured, deployed, and what it actually costs to run.

TL;DR for non-techies

This website costs about a pound a month to run. It’s hosted on Amazon’s cloud infrastructure, loads fast anywhere in the world, is secured to enterprise standards, and can be rebuilt from scratch in 10 minutes. Every part of it is automated - no manual steps, no clicking through dashboards, no room for human error. We built it this way because it’s exactly how we’d build cloud infrastructure for a client. If we can’t do it for our own site, why would you trust us to do it for yours?

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Cloud Strategy

What to Expect from a Well-Architected Review

A Well-Architected Review isn’t an audit. It’s not a pass/fail exam. It’s a structured conversation about your cloud workloads that identifies risks, highlights improvements, and gives you a clear plan to make things better.

How it works

The review is built around six pillars:

  1. Operational Excellence - how you run and monitor your workloads
  2. Security - protecting your data and systems
  3. Reliability - recovering from failures and meeting demand
  4. Performance Efficiency - using resources effectively
  5. Cost Optimisation - avoiding unnecessary spend
  6. Sustainability - minimising environmental impact

For each pillar, we work through a series of questions about your architecture, processes, and practices. It’s collaborative - we’re not there to judge, we’re there to find opportunities.

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Cloud Strategy

What Does Cloud Migration Actually Cost?

One of the first questions we get asked is “how much will it cost to move to the cloud?” The honest answer is: it depends. But that’s not very helpful, so here’s a more practical breakdown.

The three types of cost

Cloud migration costs fall into three buckets:

1. The migration itself - the work to plan, build, and move your workloads. This includes architecture design, landing zone setup, application assessment, and the actual migration execution. For most organisations, this is the biggest upfront cost.

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