Managed Services & Infrastructure
Hosting, environments, releases, monitoring, and keeping a system from quietly rotting.
A system's first year is the one everybody plans for. The failure mode this work exists to prevent arrives later: software two major versions behind, a certificate nobody is watching, a component with a published vulnerability, and no living record of how any of it was put there. Systems do not usually break. They are allowed to decay until something small breaks them.
The work covers hosting and infrastructure, the configuration that separates a live system from a test one, monitoring, backup and recovery, keeping the software underneath current, and the ongoing small changes that stop a system falling behind.
Releases are automated from the system of record, not pushed by hand, and what actually went live is verified against what was intended instead of assumed. The most common release incident we see is not a failure; it is a successful release of the wrong thing, confirmed by looking at a status page instead of at the running site.
Release is verified against the live URL, not against the build status. A marker that exists only in the new build is polled for until it appears, and the site is re-checked in production afterwards. A green build and a live site are different claims.
The amount of third-party software a system rests on is kept small, so that keeping it current stays possible. Every piece of it is a surface somebody will inherit, and a system resting on a handful can still be rebuilt three years later; one resting on several hundred has had its maintenance cost decided by whoever assembled it. Adding to the pile is a decision argued in writing.
Backups are verified by restoring them. A backup that has never been restored is a belief, not a backup, and the moment to discover the difference is not during an incident. Recovery procedure is written down and the recovery time is measured, not estimated.
Ownership is separated deliberately. The client's domain is registered in the client's name and the client's payment account is the client's own; the firm holds operational infrastructure. If an engagement ends, the things that carry the client's money, identity, and brand are already theirs, and the handover is a transfer of access, not a negotiation.
Monitoring covers the things a business actually depends on and would not otherwise notice: the domain resolving, the certificate valid, mail to the published address arriving, and the contact form producing a message a human receives. On a site where the form is the only way in, that last check outranks every performance metric.
7 pages.
Releasing changes
The commit that was built is verified by its identifier, and the release is verified against the live address instead of against a build status.
Backup and recovery
A backup nobody has restored is a belief; recovery time is measured by performing it, not estimated from the size of the file.
Environments
A non-production environment earns its cost by being wrong in the same ways production is.
Monitoring
Watching the things a business would actually notice losing, rather than the things that are easy to graph.
Keeping software current
Few enough third-party components that keeping them current stays possible three years after launch.
Ownership and access
The domain, the payment account and the cloud accounts are the client's; handover is a transfer of access, not a negotiation.
Coverage and response
Stated hours, not implied availability, because a commitment is only worth what somebody can plan around.
What Managed Services & Infrastructure does not take on.
- Round-the-clock incident response. Coverage windows are stated plainly, not implied.
- Taking over infrastructure that cannot be audited, or accounts where access cannot be properly separated.
- Holding a client's domain or payment account in the firm's name.