Lift-and-Shift vs Re-Architecting When moving to the cloud you face a choice: copy your systems across largely as they are, or redesign them to take advantage of what the cloud offers. Each has a place, and picking the right one for each ...

Kubernetes in Plain English Kubernetes is a system for running and managing large numbers of containers automatically. If containers are shipping boxes, Kubernetes is the port that decides where each one goes, replaces any that fall over,...

Understanding Cloud Pricing and Avoiding Bill Shock Cloud billing is famously detailed. You are charged for computing time, storage, data transfer and dozens of smaller items, all metered to the minute. Without good habits, the monthly bi...

Secrets Management in the Cloud Applications need passwords, API keys and certificates to talk to databases and other services. These ‘secrets’ are highly sensitive, and storing them carelessly — in code or config files — is a common and ...

Public, Private and Hybrid Cloud Explained Not all clouds are the same shape. The terms public, private and hybrid describe where your computing lives and who shares the underlying hardware with you. Knowing the d...

What 'The Cloud' Actually Means ‘The cloud’ is a phrase that gets used everywhere, often without much explanation. In practice it simply means renting computing power, storage and software from a large provider over the internet, instead ...

Spot Instances for Cheap Batch Work Spot instances let you use a cloud provider's spare capacity at a steep discount — often a fraction of the standard price. The catch is that the provider can reclaim them at short notice, so they suit s...

Choosing a Cloud Region for UK Businesses Where you place your cloud resources affects loading speed, data-protection compliance and sometimes cost. For UK businesses there is usually a clear front-runner, but it is worth understanding th...

Cloud Vendor Lock-In and How to Reduce It Vendor lock-in is the difficulty of moving away from a provider once you depend heavily on their specific services. It is rarely a reason to avoid the cloud, but it is worth managing so you keep y...

Right-Sizing: Cutting Cloud Waste Right-sizing means matching the capacity you pay for to the capacity you actually use. It is one of the quickest ways to cut a cloud bill, because most accounts contain resources that are larger than they...

Compliance in the Cloud (ISO, SOC 2, GDPR) Operating in the cloud does not remove your compliance obligations, but the major providers can make meeting them considerably easier. Understanding how responsibility is shared is key to staying...

Why Businesses Move from On-Premise to Cloud ‘On-premise’ means running your own servers in your own building or a rented rack. It served businesses well for decades, but more and more are moving to the cloud — and for good, practical rea...

IaaS, PaaS and SaaS: The Three Service Models Cloud services come in different levels of ‘how much do you manage yourself’. The three common labels — IaaS, PaaS and SaaS — describe a spectrum from raw building blocks to ready-to-use softw...

A Typical Cloud Migration Timeline Clients often ask how long a cloud migration takes. The honest answer is ‘it depends’, but there is a recognisable shape to most projects. Knowing the phases helps you plan resources and set expectations...

Planning a Cloud Migration Without Disruption The biggest worry around any migration is downtime — the fear that systems will be unavailable while everything moves. With careful planning, most migrations cause little or no noticeable disr...

Auto-Scaling: Paying for What You Use Auto-scaling is one of the cloud's most useful tricks. It automatically adds computing capacity when demand rises and removes it when things quieten down, so you neither run out of power nor pay for i...

Data Transfer Costs Explained One of the most overlooked items on a cloud bill is data transfer — the cost of moving data out of, and sometimes within, the cloud. It can quietly become a meaningful expense if no one is paying attention....

Load Balancers and High Availability A load balancer sits in front of your servers and spreads incoming traffic across them. It is a cornerstone of high availability — keeping a service running even when individual servers fail or get bus...

Object Storage vs Block Storage The cloud offers different kinds of storage for different jobs. Two of the most common are object storage and block storage. Choosing the right one affects both performance and cost. This article exp...

Disaster Recovery Across Regions Disaster recovery is your plan for the rare but serious event — a whole data centre or region becoming unavailable. Spreading critical systems across regions means a major failure in one place need not tak...

Monitoring and Alerting in the Cloud You cannot manage what you cannot see. Monitoring continuously watches your systems' health and performance, while alerting tells the right people the moment something needs attention. Together ...

Blue-Green Deployments in the Cloud A blue-green deployment is a technique for releasing new software with little or no downtime and a fast way back if something goes wrong. It works by running two identical environments and switching bet...

Infrastructure as Code: Repeatable Environments Infrastructure as Code, often shortened to IaC, means describing your servers, networks and services in text files rather than clicking through web consoles by hand. Those files can then be ...

Decommissioning Old Infrastructure Safely After a migration, the old environment still exists — and switching it off too soon, or leaving it running indefinitely, both carry risks. Decommissioning is the careful process of retiring infras...

Regions and Availability Zones Cloud providers run data centres all over the world, grouped into regions and subdivided into availability zones. These terms decide where your data physically lives and how resilient your ...

Reserved Instances and Savings Plans Cloud providers reward commitment. If you know you will run certain resources steadily for a year or more, you can commit in advance through reserved instances or savings plans and pay significantly le...

Private Networking and VPCs A Virtual Private Cloud, or VPC, is your own private, isolated section of a public cloud. It lets your servers and services communicate securely with each other while keeping them shielded from the open interne...

Backups and Snapshots in the Cloud Even on resilient cloud platforms, backups remain essential. Hardware rarely fails, but human error, faulty code and malicious activity can all destroy or corrupt data. A good backup strategy is your saf...

AWS, Azure and Google Cloud: A Plain Comparison The three big cloud providers — Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) — offer broadly similar capabilities, yet each has its own personality, strengths a...

Identity and Access Management (IAM) Basics Identity and Access Management, usually abbreviated to IAM, controls who can do what within your cloud account. Getting it right is one of the most important security decisions you will make, be...

Containers and Why Teams Use Docker Containers are a way of packaging software together with everything it needs to run, so it behaves identically on a developer's laptop, a test server and live infrastructure. Docker is the most widely u...

Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) and Global Speed A content delivery network, or CDN, is a global network of servers that stores copies of your website's files close to your visitors. The result is faster loading times wherever your audie...

Edge Computing and Why It Is Growing Edge computing means processing data closer to where it is created or needed, rather than sending everything to a central data centre. As more devices and faster responses are expected, this approach i...

Migrating Email and Files to the Cloud For many businesses, the first taste of the cloud is moving email and shared files into a service such as Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace. It is a high-impact, relatively low-risk step that staff f...

Cloud Cost Monitoring and Budgets Because cloud spend changes daily with usage, the only way to stay in control is to watch it continuously and set budgets with alerts. Done well, this turns an unpredictable bill into a managed, forecasta...

Multi-Cloud: Pros, Cons and Reality Multi-cloud means deliberately using more than one cloud provider — perhaps AWS for one workload and Azure for another. It is often discussed as a goal in itself, but the reality is more nuanced, and it...

Serverless Computing: Functions Without Servers ‘Serverless’ is a slightly misleading name — there are still servers, you just never have to think about them. Your code runs only when triggered, and you pay only for the milliseconds it ac...

Managed Databases vs Self-Hosted Almost every application needs a database, and the cloud lets you either run one yourself on a server or use a managed service where the provider handles the heavy lifting. The choice affects effo...

Tagging Resources for Cost Visibility In a busy cloud account, hundreds of resources can accumulate. Without labels, working out which project, team or client each one belongs to — and therefore what is driving your bill — becomes guesswo...