Daryl Smith Consulting logoForging the Future

Cloud & Platform Services

Modernize, migrate, and operate with confidence—balancing speed, resiliency, and compliance.

Offerings

Cloud programs we run end-to-end

  1. Strategy & Readiness

    Cloud business cases

    • Total cost models, savings projections, and ROI narratives.
    • Roadmaps that sequence quick wins, migrations, and modernization.
    • Executive-ready materials for approvals and funding cycles.

    Landing zone assessments

    • Scorecards for identity, networking, logging, and compliance.
    • Gap remediation plans with prioritized control implementation.
    • Reference architectures tailored to regulated workloads.
  2. Migration & Modernization

    App & data migrations

    • Portfolio rationalization and wave planning.
    • Refactor vs. rehost playbooks with automation pipelines.
    • Data estate migrations (warehouses, lakes, analytics).

    Legacy modernization

    • Containerization, serverless rewrites, and event-driven patterns.
    • Strangler patterns with blue/green and canary deployment strategies.
    • Mainframe or ERP integration via APIs and managed services.
  3. Platform Engineering

    Developer experience

    • Golden paths with scaffolding CLIs and automated guardrails.
    • Internal developer portals with service catalogs and scorecards.
    • Self-service environment provisioning with policy-as-code.

    Infrastructure automation

    • Terraform/CDK libraries with versioning and testing.
    • GitOps pipelines (Argo, Flux) and deployment choreographies.
    • Reusable patterns for data, ML, and integration workloads.
  4. Operations & Reliability

    SRE enablement

    • SLI/SLO design and error-budget policies.
    • Observability platforms covering logs, metrics, traces, and RUM.
    • Incident command training, tabletop exercises, and chaos testing.

    Managed operations

    • 24/7 runbooks for patching, scaling, and backup validation.
    • Cost, performance, and capacity reviews with actionable backlogs.
    • On-call augmentation with automated escalation workflows.
  5. Security & Compliance

    Governance & controls

    • Identity, network, and data-control baselines mapped to frameworks.
    • Policy-as-code enforcement plus drift alerting.
    • Audit evidence automation for FedRAMP, HIPAA, CJIS, and more.

    Threat detection

    • Cloud-native SIEM tuning and runbooks.
    • Automated incident response for key workloads.
    • Vulnerability management tied to risk scoring and patch SLAs.
  6. FinOps & Optimization

    • Unit-cost KPIs with tagging strategies and anomaly alerts.
    • Reserved capacity and savings-plan optimization.
    • Chargeback models, showback dashboards, and executive reporting.

Mission-ready cloud

From assessment to always-on operations

We have led large-scale migrations for public sector, aerospace, and commercial teams that can’t afford downtime. Our approach blends automation, documentation, and hands-on enablement so your teams inherit a platform they can trust.

Engagements can be structured as fixed-scope projects, embedded squads, or managed services to cover day-two operations.

Where we focus

Landing zones & migrations

Blueprint secure AWS/Azure/GCP foundations, then move workloads with automated guardrails and FinOps visibility.

Platform engineering

Developer platforms with golden paths, Kubernetes/operator automation, and built-in policy compliance.

SRE & operations

24/7 observability, incident playbooks, chaos drills, and performance tuning to keep critical missions online.

Plan a cloud review

Example deliverables

  • Cloud economic models, capacity forecasts, and cost-optimization backlogs.
  • IaC modules (Terraform/CDK) with automated policy checks and drift detection.
  • Observability stack spanning logs, metrics, traces, and user experience monitoring.
  • Incident response playbooks, chaos engineering drills, and training workshops.