From single-container Azure Container Apps deployments to multi-tenant AKS landing zones with secure-by-default networking, signed images via ACR, GitHub-based CI/CD, blue-green rollouts, and proper SLOs. Designed and operated by people who've run regulated, high-availability workloads — not a generic "DevOps" outfit.
If your team is shipping containers — or wants to — and needs the platform underneath to be properly architected, secured, and operated, this is the right offering. Smart IT covers managed Microsoft 365 for the office; Container Services covers the production runtime for your application. They're complementary but distinct.
Azure-native services, opinionated defaults, no exotic dependencies. Every component has a clear purpose; nothing is included because it's fashionable. We pick the simplest service that meets the requirement.
The default starting point for most workloads. Serverless containers, scale-to-zero, KEDA-based autoscaling, built-in ingress with TLS, Dapr integration if you need it. Cheaper to operate than AKS for the 80% of workloads that don't need Kubernetes-level control.
When the workload needs full Kubernetes — complex networking, custom CRDs, GPU scheduling, multi-tenancy with tight isolation, or a team that already knows K8s and wants to use it. We design the cluster topology, node pools, identity (Workload Identity), and policy-as-code (Azure Policy + Gatekeeper).
Private registry with image signing (cosign or notation), vulnerability scanning (Defender for Cloud / Trivy in CI), retention policies, and geo-replication where customers demand regional residency. Every image in production is traceable to a specific commit and a specific approver.
Global edge ingress with WAF, DDoS protection, and bot management. Routes per-region traffic, terminates TLS at the edge, enforces request shapes before traffic hits your backend. Configured as code so you can audit policy changes.
Azure Database for PostgreSQL Flexible Server or Azure SQL depending on the workload. Always with private endpoints (no public exposure), TDE/encryption-at-rest, point-in-time restore, geo-redundant backups, and a documented restore-test schedule. Connection strings live in Key Vault, never in source.
Azure Monitor for the platform, Application Insights for the app, Log Analytics for everything tied together. Distributed tracing via OpenTelemetry. Alerting tuned for actionable signals — pages should mean something, not generate noise. Dashboards that engineers actually use, not a wall of green tiles.
The pipeline is the boring part everyone wishes they didn't have to think about. We make it boring on purpose. GitHub Actions, OIDC federation to Azure (no static credentials), trunk-based development, and progressive delivery patterns appropriate for your risk tolerance.
Security work that gets bolted on later rarely lands. We build the platform with the security posture pre-wired — private networking, signed images, rotated secrets, audit-ready logging — so you're not retrofitting compliance during a SOC 2 audit.
Backend services and databases on private endpoints. No public IPs unless there's a documented reason. Front Door is the only public-facing surface for most stacks.
Workload Identity for AKS, Managed Identity for Container Apps. Services authenticate to Azure resources via short-lived tokens — not stored secrets, not connection strings.
Application secrets are referenced from Key Vault at runtime. Rotated on a schedule. Access audited. Engineers don't see production secrets in their day-to-day work.
Distroless or Alpine where possible. Smaller images mean smaller attack surface, faster cold-starts, and cheaper egress. Microsoft Artifact Registry images for first-party services.
Azure Policy + Gatekeeper enforce baselines: no public storage, no unencrypted disks, no admin-level RBAC at the resource level. Violations fail the deploy, not the audit.
All control-plane and data-plane events flow to Log Analytics with retention configured for your compliance regime. SOC 2 and ISO 27001 evidence collection becomes a query, not a fire drill.
For SaaS founders specifically: the most consequential architectural decision you make is your tenant isolation model. We don't impose one — we work with you to pick the right one and implement it correctly. Three common patterns we've shipped:
You're moving from a VM-based deployment, a shared-hosting setup, or someone else's cloud account. You need a real platform that scales beyond the founder's laptop without rewriting the application.
The dev team can write Dockerfiles. They need someone to design the production landing zone, the CI/CD pipeline, the secrets management, and the observability layer — so they can stay focused on the application.
Healthcare, finance, public sector. You need provable isolation, audit logs, signed images, and policy enforcement that you can show an auditor. We've designed for these regimes; we know what auditors actually look at.
The first call is 30 minutes. We want to understand the workload, the team, the constraints, and the timeline. If we're a fit, you'll get a written proposal within a week — fixed-scope, fixed-price (or T&M with not-to-exceed for genuinely ambiguous engagements). If we aren't a fit, we'll say so.