Cloud-Native Infrastructure

Cloud-native means designing applications specifically to exploit cloud capabilities like elastic scaling, managed services, and distributed architecture, rather than simply lifting on-premises applications into virtual machines in the cloud. MicrocosmWorks builds cloud-native systems using containerization, declarative infrastructure-as-code, service meshes, and CI/CD automation that treat infrastructure as ephemeral and replaceable rather than precious and long-lived. The practical difference is that a cloud-native application can scale from 10 to 10,000 users automatically, recover from infrastructure failures without human intervention, and deploy updates dozens of times per day.

MicrocosmWorks recommends Kubernetes for organizations running 10+ microservices that need advanced orchestration features like auto-scaling, rolling deployments, service discovery, and multi-environment consistency, while simpler platforms like AWS ECS, Google Cloud Run, or Azure Container Apps are better for teams with fewer services or limited Kubernetes expertise. We have seen many teams adopt Kubernetes prematurely and spend more time managing the cluster than building features, so we evaluate your actual workload complexity and team maturity before recommending the orchestration layer. Our assessment includes a TCO analysis comparing managed Kubernetes, serverless containers, and platform-as-a-service options for your specific scale.

MicrocosmWorks standardizes on Terraform for multi-cloud infrastructure provisioning and Pulumi for teams that prefer using programming languages like TypeScript or Python instead of HCL, with all infrastructure definitions stored in Git and deployed through the same CI/CD pipeline as application code. We structure IaC repositories into reusable modules for networking, compute, databases, and observability that can be composed into environment-specific configurations, ensuring consistency between development, staging, and production. Every infrastructure change goes through pull request review with automated plan previews that show exactly what resources will be created, modified, or destroyed before any change is applied.

MicrocosmWorks designs cloud-native architectures with an abstraction layer that isolates cloud-specific dependencies behind well-defined interfaces, making it possible to swap providers for individual services without rewriting the entire application. We use portable technologies like Kubernetes, PostgreSQL, Redis, and OpenTelemetry wherever possible, and wrap cloud-specific services like DynamoDB or Cloud Spanner in adapter layers that can be reimplemented for alternative providers. This approach adds minimal overhead during initial development but saves months of migration effort if you later need to move workloads to a different provider or adopt a multi-cloud strategy for compliance or resilience reasons.

A typical cloud-native infrastructure engagement begins with a 2-week assessment where MicrocosmWorks evaluates your current architecture, workloads, and team capabilities, followed by a 4-8 week platform build that delivers the foundational infrastructure including container orchestration, CI/CD pipelines, observability, and security controls. We then run a 4-6 week application migration phase where we containerize and deploy your first 2-3 services onto the new platform with your engineering team embedded alongside ours for hands-on knowledge transfer. Our cloud-native consulting rates range from $10-$40/hr, and the full engagement from assessment through production readiness typically spans 10-16 weeks.