Reviewed by Dr. Dmytro Nasyrov, Founder and CTO • Last updated April 24, 2026
Cloud Services and Migration
Pharos Production delivers Cloud Services covering migration, infrastructure management, optimization and security across AWS, Azure and Google Cloud.
- 90+ engineers
- 18 industries
- 13+ years in business
Reviewed by Dmytro Nasyrov
Founder and CTO
23+ years in custom software development. Led 70+ projects across FinTech, healthcare, Web3 and enterprise. ISO 27001 certified team.
What are cloud services?
Authoritative citations 12 sources
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DORA State of DevOps Report
The Google DORA State of DevOps annual report defines the four key software delivery metrics (deployment frequency, lead time for changes, mean time to restore, change failure rate) that we instrument on every production engagement to benchmark delivery performance.
dora.dev
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Stack Overflow Developer Survey
The Stack Overflow Developer Survey documents language, framework, database and tooling adoption across tens of thousands of engineers annually, and we use the trend lines to validate stack choices against hiring pool depth for each client.
survey.stackoverflow.co
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ThoughtWorks Technology Radar
The ThoughtWorks Technology Radar tracks tools, platforms, techniques and languages across adopt, trial, assess and hold rings twice yearly, and is a cross-check we use to validate architectural recommendations against industry consensus.
thoughtworks.com
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Google SRE Book
The Google SRE book codifies service-level objectives, error budgets, incident response and postmortem culture that our production readiness gates adopt directly when handing over a platform to a client operations team.
sre.google
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Martin Fowler bliki
Martin Fowler's bliki is the most cited reference for enterprise architecture patterns including microservices, strangler fig, CQRS, event sourcing and refactoring, which shapes how we describe and implement architecture decisions in ADRs on every client engagement.
martinfowler.com
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Gartner Custom Application Services Magic Quadrant
Gartner publishes multiple Magic Quadrant reports covering custom application services, digital engineering and outsourced development that identify market leaders, completeness of vision and niche specialists across the global software services industry.
gartner.com
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ISO 27001 Information Security Standard
ISO 27001:2022 defines the internationally recognized information security management system requirements that Pharos Production operates under, shaping the control framework we inherit and extend for client software engagements.
iso.org
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OWASP Top 10
The OWASP Top 10 ranks the highest-impact web application security risks and is the single most cited threat reference for application security programs, which every Pharos build is reviewed against before production release.
owasp.org
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NIST Secure Software Development Framework
NIST SSDF SP 800-218 defines secure development practices including threat modelling, SBOM generation, vulnerability disclosure and supply chain controls, which we treat as the baseline Software Development Lifecycle checklist on every client engagement.
csrc.nist.gov
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CNCF Cloud Native Landscape
The CNCF Cloud Native Landscape maps the full cloud-native ecosystem across orchestration, runtime, observability, security and database categories, useful reference material we consult when validating platform choices for client Kubernetes and service mesh engagements.
landscape.cncf.io
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Accelerate by Forsgren, Humble, Kim
Accelerate distills the multi-year DORA research program into the book-length case for DevOps practices correlated with high-performance software delivery, and is the single most cited academic reference for the delivery metrics we ship inside every client engagement.
itrevolution.com
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IEEE SWEBOK
The IEEE Software Engineering Body of Knowledge codifies the professional knowledge areas covering requirements, design, construction, testing, maintenance, configuration management and engineering economics that underpin every professional software services engagement.
computer.org
- Lift-and-shift migrations with no re-architecture value (often move the problem, not fix it)
- Multi-cloud setups that add complexity without business justification
- Cloud migrations without a cost model and target architecture
- FinOps engagements without an owner on the client side
Cloud services at Pharos Production at a glance
- Cloud engagements: 35+ cloud engagements since 2016 (architecture, migration, cost optimization, compliance) across AWS, GCP and Azure
- Specializations: Kubernetes migrations, multi-region DR, FinOps cost optimization, serverless architecture, compliance (HIPAA/PCI DSS/SOC 2)
- Stack: Terraform, Pulumi, AWS CDK, Helm, ArgoCD, Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, OpenTelemetry, Prowler, ScoutSuite
- Managed services: EKS/GKE/AKS, Lambda/Cloud Functions/Azure Functions, RDS/Cloud SQL, S3/GCS/Blob, API Gateway, CloudFront/Cloud CDN, Cognito/Identity
- Pricing: Architecture review from $8,000; migration projects $40,000-$150,000+; FinOps engagements $30,000-$120,000; retainers from $8,000/month
- Timeline: Architecture review 1-2 weeks; migration 2-6 months; cost optimization 4-12 weeks; ongoing support month-to-month
- Compliance: HIPAA, PCI DSS, SOC 2, ISO 27001, GDPR; Pharos is ISO 27001 certified
- Honest scope: We recommend managed PaaS for early-stage and decline multi-cloud projects without business justification
Custom cloud architecture vs managed PaaS: which is better?
Custom cloud architecture on AWS/GCP/Azure gives you full control, cost efficiency at scale and compliance flexibility, while managed PaaS (Heroku, Render, Vercel, Railway, Fly.io) eliminates infrastructure work for early-stage apps. According to a 2024 Gartner report, PaaS adoption is growing fastest at small companies while large-scale SaaS continues to run custom cloud infrastructure for cost and compliance reasons.
| Factor | Custom cloud architecture | Managed PaaS |
|---|---|---|
| Infrastructure control | Full control over networking, compute, storage, data locality | Vendor-managed; limited to platform capabilities |
| Cost at scale | Fixed baseline + marginal cost; spot, Savings Plans, reserved | Per-dyno/per-function billing scales linearly |
| Compliance | Data residency, audit logs, encryption controls baked in | Inherited from platform; some workloads ineligible |
| Multi-region | Full control over multi-region topology and failover | Limited multi-region options |
| Specialized compute | GPU, TPU, bare metal, HPC instances, edge compute | Standard compute only in most PaaS |
| Time to launch | 2-6 months for production-grade cloud architecture | Hours to a working staging environment |
| Operational load | Requires SRE practice and on-call rotation | Vendor handles most operations |
| Best fit | FinTech, healthcare, high-load SaaS, regulated industries, multi-region | Early-stage apps, side projects, MVPs, internal tools |
Our cloud engineering process
Cloud projects follow Pharos Verified Delivery with cloud-specific gates: discovery includes target architecture + cost model + compliance baseline; build includes infrastructure-as-code with reviewable changes + cost tracking; production readiness covers monitoring, disaster recovery drill and security baseline; support includes quarterly cost reviews and compliance walkthroughs.
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Phase 01 / 04 Paid Discovery
2-4 weeks- Technical validation
- Architecture proposal
- Scope refined estimate
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Phase 02 / 04 Iterative Build
2-week sprints- Working demos every sprint
- CTO review at milestones
- ADRs documented
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Phase 03 / 04 Production Readiness
- Monitoring and alerting
- Security audit Pen test
- Runbooks and rollback
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Phase 04 / 04 Support
Ongoing- Security patches
- Performance tuning
- 4h SLA response
Pharos Verified Delivery applied to 70+ production applications since 2013
Cloud engagements with receipts
Three cloud engagements where architecture, cost or compliance changes produced measurable outcomes.
AWS bill of $87,000/month. Engineering team could not explain where the money went. Reserved instances expired unused. Three idle RDS clusters. Zero cost attribution.
AWS bill down to $42,000/month through right-sizing, Savings Plans, spot instances for batch workloads, and killing idle resources. Cost attribution dashboards show spend per team and per feature. Zero reliability regressions.
We instrumented Cost Explorer + CUR into a per-service dashboard first. Nothing was cut without a conversation with the team that owned the resource. The idle clusters were the easy win; the compounding savings came from Savings Plans tuned to actual usage patterns.
Single-region EKS deployment in eu-west-1. No DR plan beyond snapshots. A region outage would have been a 6-12 hour recovery. Regulators required < 1 hour RTO.
Multi-region active-passive across eu-west-1 and eu-central-1 with automated failover via Route 53 health checks. RTO < 12 minutes, RPO < 60 seconds. Quarterly DR drills validate actual recovery time.
We ran a real DR drill in week 6 of the engagement — failed over eu-west-1 to eu-central-1 and measured recovery time. First drill took 47 minutes because of DNS TTL; we tuned it to 12 minutes by the second drill.
Monolithic EC2 deployment with manual scaling. Peak traffic events (flash sales, product launches) caused 20-40 minute timeouts. Over-provisioning cost $14,000/month in idle capacity.
Serverless migration to Lambda + API Gateway + DynamoDB for the hot paths, EC2 retained for the admin layer. Zero timeouts during the next 3 flash sales. Idle capacity cost eliminated. Total monthly cost dropped 38%.
Not everything moved to serverless — we identified the request patterns that benefited (bursty traffic, independent scaling) and left the admin layer on EC2 where predictable capacity worked. The hybrid was 38% cheaper than either extreme.
Client names anonymized under NDA. Full case studies at /cases/.
When custom cloud infrastructure is not the answer
We decline roughly 30% of RFPs we receive. Forcing a bad fit costs both sides 3-6 months and damages outcomes. Here is how we think about scope:
- Simple apps where Heroku, Render or Railway would eliminate infrastructure work
- Static sites where Vercel, Netlify or Cloudflare Pages cover the requirement
- Multi-cloud setups that add complexity without business justification
- Kubernetes adoption without team expertise to operate it long-term
- "Cloud migration" without a cost model and target architecture
For early-stage products, managed PaaS (Heroku, Render, Railway, Vercel) eliminates infrastructure overhead at 30-50% lower total cost of ownership. Custom cloud architecture makes sense when you need cost optimization at scale, multi-region presence, regulatory data residency, specialized compute (GPU, edge), or a compliance posture that PaaS cannot deliver. We have recommended Heroku over custom AWS on many engagements.
Pharos Production cloud and migration portfolio observations
Observations from 26 cloud migration and modernisation engagements delivered between 2019 and 2026 across FinTech, healthcare, SaaS and e-commerce.
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Customers who started migrations with a data-gravity map cut unexpected egress bills by 78 percent on average across 9 engagements.
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Lift-and-shift projects without refactoring showed a 2.4x higher total cost of ownership at 18 months than re-platformed equivalents.
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Multi-cloud control plane adoption (Crossplane or Terraform with abstractions) reduced vendor lock-in exit time from 9 months to 12 weeks in our three migration-reversal cases.
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Teams of 5 to 8 engineers completed 50 to 120 workload migrations in 6 to 9 months when backed by a platform team running the landing zone.
Cloud services and migration outlook 2026-2027
How to evaluate a cloud migration in 90 days
Lesson from production: the data egress surprise
A healthcare customer migrated 28 TB of imaging data from on-premises to AWS S3 in 2024. The inbound migration was free; the first month of production traffic showed $18,400 in unexpected egress charges because a downstream analytics tool pulled full objects across regions on every query. Root cause: no data-gravity map, no region co-location audit, no CloudFront caching. We moved the analytics tool into the same region, added Origin Access for the minority of cross-region calls and enabled S3 Intelligent Tiering. Next-month egress dropped to $620 and stayed there. The lesson we enforce: every cloud migration needs a data-gravity map before the first byte moves.
Published record
Published Pharos research
Technical articles, comparison guides and methodology deep-dives we write from our own delivery experience.
Platforms We Work With
Trusted by Coinbase, Consensys, Core Scientific, MicroStrategy, Gate.io and 10+ more Web3 and enterprise platforms
16+ partnersOur 16 technology partners include:
- Consensys
- Gate Io
- Coinbase
- Ludo
- Core Scientific
- Debut Infotech
- Axoni
- Alchemy
- Starkware
- Mara Holdings
- Microstrategy
- Nubank
- Okx
- Uniswap
- Riot
- Leeway Hertz
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Consensys
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Gate Io
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Coinbase
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Ludo
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Core Scientific
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Debut Infotech
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Axoni
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Alchemy
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Starkware
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Mara Holdings
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Microstrategy
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Nubank
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Okx
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Uniswap
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Riot
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Leeway Hertz
About Founder and CTO
I design and build reliable software solutions — from lightweight apps to high-load distributed systems and blockchain platforms.
PhD in Artificial Intelligence, MSc in Computer Science (with honors), MSc in Electronics & Precision Mechanics.
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12 years in architecture of great software solutions tailored to customer needs for startups and enterprises
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23 years of practical enterprise customized software production experience
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Lecturer at the National Kyiv Polytechnic University
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Doctor of Philosophy in Artificial Intelligence
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Master’s degree in Computer Science, completed with excellence
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Master’s degree in Electronics and precision mechanics engineering
Choose your cooperation model
Scoped MVP with core user flows, clean codebase and production-ready deployment.
Full-feature build, QA, CI/CD and post-launch stabilization with SLA-backed support.
End-to-end engagement: discovery, architecture, build, DevOps, QA and long-term evolution.
Prices vary based on project scope, complexity, timeline and requirements. Contact us for a personalized estimate.
Or select the appropriate interaction model
Request staff augmentation
Need extra hands on your software project? Our developers can jump in at any stage – from architecture to auditing – and integrate seamlessly with your team to fill any technical gaps.
Hire dedicated experts
Whether you’re building from scratch or scaling fast, our engineers are ready to step in. You stay in control, and we handle the code.
Outsource your project
From first line to final audit, we handle the entire development process. We will deliver secure, production-ready software, while you can focus on your business.
Technologies, tools and frameworks we use
Our engineers work with 187+ technologies across blockchain, backend, frontend, mobile and DevOps - chosen for production reliability and performance.
AI and Machine Learning
LLM Providers 8
AI Frameworks 15
Vector Databases 7
MLOps and Infrastructure 11
AI Agent Tools 4
Blockchains
Private and Public Blockchains 33
Cloud Blockchain Solutions 4
DevOps
DevOps Tools 15
Clouds
Clouds 6
Databases
Databases 15
Brokers
Event and Message Brokers 7
Tests
Test Automation Tools 6
UI/UX
UI/UX Design Tools 12
Partnerships & Awards
Recognized on Clutch, GoodFirms and The Manifest for software engineering excellence
An approach to the development cycle
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Team Assembly
Our company starts and assembles an entire project specialists with the perfect blend of skills and experience to start the work.
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MVP
We’ll design, build, and launch your MVP, ensuring it meets the core requirements of your software solution.
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Production
We’ll create a complete software solution that is custom-made to meet your exact specifications.
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Ongoing
Continuous Support
Our company will be right there with you, keeping your software solution running smoothly, fixing issues, and rolling out updates.
FAQ
Quick answers to common questions about custom software development, pricing, process and technology.
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AWS for the deepest service catalog and mature enterprise features. GCP for BigQuery + Kubernetes + ML tooling.
Azure for .NET-heavy enterprises and Microsoft integrations. The right choice depends on team skills, existing contracts and specific service needs. We are not vendor-exclusive - we run production workloads on all three and will recommend the one that fits your workload, not the one with the biggest kickback.
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Depends on what you are solving. Cloud migration makes sense when: you need on-demand capacity for bursty workloads, you want managed services to reduce operations, you need multi-region presence, you need specific cloud services (ML, big data, GPU).
Cloud migration does NOT make sense for: stable predictable workloads where on-prem is cheaper, regulated workloads where cloud compliance does not fit, or lift-and-shift moves that reproduce the on-prem problems in the cloud. We assess fit during discovery.
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Typical first-year savings from a FinOps engagement: 30-55% on compute through right-sizing + Savings Plans + spot for batch, 20-40% on storage through lifecycle policies, 15-30% on data transfer by fixing architectural issues. Real example: an AWS bill of $87,000/month dropped to $42,000/month after a 6-week engagement.
We instrument Cost Explorer into a per-team dashboard first so nothing is cut without a conversation.
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DR targets: Recovery Time Objective (RTO, how fast to restore) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO, how much data loss is tolerable). We design DR to the RTO/RPO the business commits to, not the most expensive option.
Multi-region active-active for RTO < 1 minute, cross-region standby for RTO < 1 hour, backup restoration for RTO < 24 hours. We run a real DR drill quarterly - tabletop plans are not DR.
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Use Kubernetes when you have multiple services with independent scaling needs, multiple teams deploying independently, or specialized workloads (GPU, spot, stateful with complex orchestration). Do NOT use Kubernetes if your team has fewer than 3 engineers who can debug it at 3am, if a managed PaaS covers your needs, or if you want it as a resume-builder.
We have recommended Heroku and Render over Kubernetes for many early-stage clients.
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Yes, where it fits. Serverless (Lambda, Cloud Functions, Azure Functions) wins for bursty traffic, event-driven workloads, scheduled jobs and infrequent requests.
It loses for steady-state high-throughput APIs (cold starts + cost), long-running computations (15-minute timeout), and workloads needing persistent connections. Most production systems are hybrid - serverless for hot paths, containers or VMs for steady-state services.
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We design to the specific regulatory framework during discovery - HIPAA requires BAAs and PHI-specific controls, PCI DSS requires segmentation and tokenization, SOC 2 requires audit logs and access review. Pharos infrastructure is ISO 27001 certified.
For client projects we use cloud-native compliance tooling (AWS Config, Security Hub, GuardDuty, Cloud Security Command Center) plus third-party tools (Prowler, Wiz, Orca) for continuous monitoring. Accredited auditors issue the actual certifications.
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We decline lift-and-shift migrations with no re-architecture value, multi-cloud setups without business justification, Kubernetes adoption without operational capacity, cloud migrations without a cost model and target architecture, and FinOps engagements without a client-side owner. We also decline “modernization” work without a measured reliability or cost problem.
The Pharos takeaway on cloud migration
Cloud migration in 2026 is measurable: landing zone maturity, IaC coverage, FinOps visibility and documented exit strategy. Pharos Production plans migrations around data gravity, regulatory residency and operating cost, not just workload relocation.
Your business results matter
Achieve them with minimized risk through our bespoke innovation capabilities
What happens next?
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Contact us
Contact us today to discuss your project. We’re ready to review your request promptly and guide you on the best next steps for collaboration
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NDA
We’re committed to keeping your information confidential, so we’ll sign a Non-Disclosure Agreement
1 day -
Plan the Goals
After we chat about your goals and needs, we’ll craft a comprehensive proposal detailing the project scope, team, timeline and budget
3-5 days -
Finalize the Details
Let’s connect on Google Meet to go through the proposal and confirm all the details together!
1-2 days -
Sign the Contract
As soon as the contract is signed, our dedicated team will jump into action on your project!
Same day
Our offices
Headquarters in Las Vegas, Nevada. Engineering office in Kyiv, Ukraine.