Platform Engineering & DevSecOps
Your platform is either a multiplier or a bottleneck.
When the foundation is right — consistent account structure, automated pipelines, security from the first commit, visibility across every account — engineers ship with confidence. When it isn't, every release is a risk calculation and every incident is a surprise. We build the former, against the AWS Well-Architected Framework, using a four-phase engagement that leaves your team in full ownership when we're done.
Sound familiar?
The platform conversations that usually find us.
"We have six AWS accounts and no consistent way to deploy across any of them. Every team does it differently. Nothing is documented. We don't know what we'd do if someone left."
"Security reviews happen at the end of the release cycle, after everything's already merged. We delay every other release fixing something that a scan at the commit stage would have caught in minutes."
"Our AWS spend went up 38% last quarter. We have no tagging, no cost allocation — no way to tell the board which team or product is responsible for what."
How we engage
Four phases. Each one gates the next.
The same delivery framework we apply to every engagement, adapted to the specifics of platform and DevSecOps work. Nothing goes into production until it's been designed, validated, and tested. The platform your team inherits at the end is documented, owned, and built to last.
Phase 01
Define
- Current state assessment
- Well-Architected baseline
- Target operating model
- Landing Zone design
- Developer platform requirements
- FinOps & spend baseline
- Security posture baseline
Phase 02
Build
- AWS Control Tower / Landing Zone
- Account Factory & OU structure
- Network topology (TGW, VPCs)
- Security baseline (Config, Security Hub, GuardDuty)
- IAM Identity Center & SSO
- IaC foundations (Terraform / CDK)
- CI/CD golden paths & SAST integration
- Secrets management
- Observability stack
- FinOps tagging standards
- AI-assisted IaC authoring & review
Phase 03
Deploy
- Team onboarding to golden paths
- Workload migration to new platform
- Well-Architected validation review
- Load & resilience testing
- Cost allocation validation
- Security posture re-assessment
- Compliance evidence production
- AI-assisted test coverage analysis
Phase 04
Co-operate or Hand Over
- Architecture & runbook documentation
- Team enablement & training
- Ongoing FinOps reviews
- Platform evolution backlog
- SRE support (if co-operating)
- Incident playbooks & runbooks
Well-Architected Framework
How the six pillars run through the engagement.
The AWS Well-Architected Framework gives us a shared language for what good looks like. We baseline against it in Define, design to it in Build, validate against it in Deploy, and maintain alignment in Co-operate. Every platform we deliver can be defended against all six pillars.
Pillar 01
Operational Excellence
IaC, CI/CD golden paths, and runbooks mean your team can operate the platform without tribal knowledge. Changes are version-controlled. Incidents have documented response paths.
Pillar 02
Security
Shift-left security in every pipeline, least-privilege IAM, SCPs enforced at the OU level, and Security Hub active across all accounts. Security is a property of the platform, not a review at the end of the release.
Pillar 03
Reliability
Multi-AZ workload design, resilience testing before go-live, and service quotas monitored. Failure modes are understood and documented before they happen in production.
Pillar 04
Performance Efficiency
Right-sized compute, managed services where they remove undifferentiated heavy lifting, and performance benchmarks set in Deploy so you know what normal looks like.
Pillar 05
Cost Optimisation
FinOps baseline in Define, tagging enforced by Config in Build, cost allocation validated in Deploy. Every dollar is attributable. Savings Plans and Reserved Instance recommendations are part of the Co-operate review cycle.
Pillar 06
Sustainability
Right-sizing reduces waste. Managed services reduce idle compute. Workload scheduling and auto-scaling are configured to match actual demand rather than peak assumptions.
How we think about cost
Cost is a design constraint. Not a dashboard you check afterwards.
Every platform decision has a cost dimension. Ignored during design, it becomes a problem you inherit. Built in from the start, it becomes a lever. These are the seven principles that shape how we approach it.
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I
Treat cost as a non-functional requirement
Cost belongs alongside security, reliability, and performance in every architecture decision — not in a separate FinOps review six months after the platform is live. Systems that ignore cost during design inherit it as a structural problem later.
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II
Architecture should follow the business model
The platform that lasts is the one whose costs scale with revenue, not against it. Before we design anything, we map how the business makes money — and make sure infrastructure costs move in the same direction.
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III
Every decision is a trade-off
Resilience costs something. High availability costs something. Frugal engineering isn't minimising spend — it's being deliberate about what each dollar buys. We make those trade-offs explicit in Define, not implicit in production.
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IV
Unobserved systems accumulate invisible costs
If engineers can't see what their workloads cost in real time, they can't make cost-conscious decisions. Observability is a cost control mechanism. Tagging standards, cost allocation, and CloudWatch dashboards aren't reporting tools — they're part of the control surface. AI-assisted anomaly detection flags unusual spend patterns before they compound into a billing surprise.
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V
Controls need to be tunable, not just visible
Monitoring without the ability to act is just dashboards. We design platforms with tiered components — critical workloads protected, non-critical workloads controllable — so when spend increases, there's a dial to turn, not just a graph to watch.
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VI
Cost optimisation is incremental, not a one-off project
Small, continuous improvements compound at scale. The Co-operate engagement model is built around this — regular FinOps reviews, supported by AI-assisted analysis across account spend, that surface optimisation opportunities a manual review would miss. There is no finished state, only a current state.
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VII
Successful systems attract assumptions
Architectures that have worked for two years become architectures nobody questions. That's where waste accumulates. The platform evolution backlog exists to challenge what was built, test whether it's still the right answer, and catch drift before it compounds.
Why Nuvrix for platform engineering
Where platform projects go wrong — and what we do about it.
Platform engineering projects fail when the team building the platform has never had to operate one. They build what looks correct in diagrams but breaks under real operational load. We've been on both sides of that handover.
We've operated what we build
Our team has run cloud platforms post-deployment — which changes how we design them. Alerting thresholds, incident runbooks, on-call escalation paths: these are built in from day one because we know what 2am looks like when they're missing.
Security in the pipeline, not at the gate
Shift-left security is a construction pattern for us, not a principle. SAST, IaC scanning with Checkov, and secrets detection are wired into every golden path. Security teams stop being the release bottleneck because the checks run before code is ever merged.
IaC your team can own
We write Terraform or CDK that your engineers can read, modify, and extend without us. No proprietary abstractions that create a dependency. The code is documented, version-controlled, and yours from day one.
Well-Architected, not just Well-Intentioned
Every platform we build is reviewed against the AWS Well-Architected Framework at the end of Deploy — before we hand over. If the review surfaces gaps, we fix them while we're still engaged. The review report is a deliverable, not an optional extra.
FinOps from the first week
Cost visibility isn't an afterthought. Tagging standards, cost allocation, and spend baselines are part of Define. By the time you're in Deploy, every dollar is attributable to a team or product — and you have a benchmark to measure against.
Scope agreed before build starts
Platform engineering can expand indefinitely. We agree on what "done" looks like in Define — and hold to it. If the platform needs to grow beyond the agreed scope, we scope that as a separate conversation, not a change order mid-engagement.
AI-assisted engineering throughout
We use Claude Code across the Build phase — IaC module authoring, pipeline configuration, security rule writing, test generation, and documentation. Work that takes weeks by hand is done in days. The quality bar is the same; the timeline is shorter, and the savings pass through to your engagement cost.
Ready to give your team a platform they can actually ship from?
A conversation about your current setup is usually enough to identify the gaps and agree on what a Define engagement would look like. You'll hear back from an engineer who's built this before.