Architecture advice and delivery for clients who run on AWS or are considering it. We design scalable, secure and cost-efficient AWS environments, and we also build them. Vendor-neutral: we know Azure and GCP too, and we won't recommend AWS if something else suits better.
AWS consulting at Appfront is not an abstract architecture exercise separate from the build. For years we have worked with AWS for clients running production workloads on the platform: web applications, data platforms, AI environments, integration layers and client portals. We hold the conversations about architecture, security and cost with the same people who then deliver the solution. That keeps the advice honest and the delivery sharp.
We are a Dutch build studio with a cloud practice. Our position is deliberately independent: we are not a reseller of any platform, not a partner that has to hit quotas, and we have no incentive to sell you more AWS services than you need. If Azure AKS or a move to Google Cloud serves you better, we will say so. If a hybrid setup is the smartest choice, with some systems on-premises and some in AWS, we will build that. The starting point is always your situation, not a vendor's portfolio.
AWS consulting is an umbrella over several more specific engagements. If you want to approach the cloud more broadly or haven't yet chosen a specific provider, you can also start with broad digital consulting. If you've just decided to move to the cloud, cloud migration support is often a more logical first step, as we start from your existing landscape and map out the migration path. The AWS consulting on this page is aimed at organisations that have specifically chosen AWS or already have a significant footprint on it.
The question "do you do AWS consulting" covers very different areas of work. Below are the six that come up most often in our practice, each weighted differently in every engagement.
A fitting AWS design for your workload: which services, how they are divided across accounts and VPCs, with what network segmentation and redundancy approach. Not a reference architecture lifted from a whitepaper, but a design that suits your traffic patterns, team size and growth assumptions for the coming years.
A structured review of an existing AWS environment against the pillars of operational excellence, security, reliability, performance efficiency, cost optimisation and sustainability. Not a superficial scan: we dig into the IaC code, the IAM policies, the network setup and the actual run-time metrics. At the end you have a prioritised list with concrete next steps.
AWS bills tend to grow in a way that rarely feels linear to the business. We analyse where the money actually goes (over-provisioned EC2 instances, poorly sized EBS volumes, NAT gateway traffic, unused snapshots, suboptimal storage classes, missing Reserved Instances or Savings Plans) and build an approach to structurally capture the savings that make sense.
A well-run AWS account differs enormously from a mediocre one at the security foundation level. Multi-account strategy via Organizations and Control Tower, IAM roles following least privilege, encryption via KMS, segmentation with security groups and VPC peering, logging via CloudTrail and GuardDuty, secret management via Secrets Manager. We work from a clear information security policy, not from a checklist added afterwards.
From on-premises, from another cloud, or from a SaaS context. We map the existing landscape, choose the right migration strategy for each workload (rehost, replatform, refactor or replace), and build the migration path without bringing the business to a standstill. For the wider migration context, including planning, data work and organisational prerequisites, read more on cloud migration support.
If you already run on AWS but still have a lot of "lift-and-shift" workloads, there is often much to gain from modernisation: containerising services with ECS or EKS, event-driven flows via EventBridge and Step Functions, short transactions on Lambda, and an API layer via API Gateway. Not as an end in itself, but where it becomes simpler, cheaper or more robust than the existing setup.
This depends on where your AWS practice stands and which decision you have in front of you. We determine together in the first conversation which form fits; an engagement often begins with a review and grows into an implementation phase.
A structured scan of your existing AWS environment against the six pillars of the AWS Well-Architected Framework. We review IAM policies, network topology, cost drivers, observability, backup strategy and deployment pipelines. At the end you receive a findings report plus a prioritised list: not an endless document, but concrete improvements your team can act on tomorrow.
A design for a new AWS environment or a redesign of an existing one. Multi-account strategy via Organizations, a landing zone with baseline controls, a network blueprint for production and staging, identity federation, baseline logging, and an IaC approach using Terraform or CloudFormation. At the end, you have an environment in which your teams can build safely and predictably.
Strategy without execution remains theory. In this engagement, we guide not only the architectural choices but also the actual implementation: migrating workloads, setting up CI/CD pipelines with CodePipeline or GitHub Actions, modernising towards containers or serverless, and setting up observability with CloudWatch and/or a third-party stack. We stay on board until it works in production and your team can continue building independently.
AWS now offers hundreds of services, and the portfolio expands every quarter. To be honest, no partner knows all of them in detail, and neither do we. What we do is deliberately choose the services we work with routinely in client contexts, and where we have deep practical expertise. We learn the rest as needed within the scope of a specific project.
For compute, the foundation is EC2, with ECS and Fargate on top for container workloads that need to run with minimal management, and EKS where Kubernetes expertise exists within the team. Lambda for event-driven and short-running functions, with API Gateway as the front layer for REST and HTTP APIs. For data, our focus lies on RDS and Aurora for relational databases, DynamoDB for key-value and document stores, and S3 for object storage at every tier, from hot data to Glacier archives. CloudFront for edge distribution and caching.
For security and identity, we use Cognito for customer-facing authentication, IAM Identity Center for staff access, KMS for encryption keys, and Secrets Manager for credentials. For AI workloads, Bedrock and SageMaker are the two services we work with most: Bedrock for managed access to foundation models, SageMaker for more classic ML pipelines. For event architecture, we rely on EventBridge and Step Functions, and for observability on CloudWatch, supplemented where needed. If you are considering an AI project on AWS, see AI development for our broader AI practice.
No vague deliverables, but artefacts your cloud team, security officer and business owners can put to use straight away.
Four situations in which clients approach us for AWS work. If you recognise one, we'd be glad to talk — a no-obligation conversation is enough to see whether we're a good fit.
You are launching a new platform or a new business unit and have chosen AWS as the foundation. You want to get it right first time: a clean account structure, the right IaC approach, a security baseline and deployment pipelines. Not a messy proof of concept that has to be painstakingly cleaned up later, but a foundation on which your team can be productive straight away.
You're already running on AWS, but the monthly bill has become consistently higher than the business expected. You suspect overprovisioning, duplicate workloads or poor instance choices, but you lack the exact picture. An AWS Well-Architected review focused on the cost pillar puts that insight on the table and gives you the levers to address it structurally.
Your sector places requirements on data residency, logging and incident procedures: GDPR for personal data, DORA for financial service providers, NEN 7510 for healthcare. Your AWS environment must demonstrably comply, and you're looking for a partner to help get the design and the evidence in order. See also our page on ISO 27001-compliant software development for the broader security context.
The platform is live in production, customers are enthusiastic, and growth is outpacing the architecture it was designed for. Single-region becomes multi-region, a handful of containers becomes dozens, and the original choices, often made under pressure, begin to strain. You're looking for a partner who can take it to the next level of maturity without a major rebuild.
You're on the eve of a platform decision and you don't want a vendor's sales pitch. You want an independent analysis that clarifies the real trade-offs for your specific workload: cost, talent availability, ecosystem fit, compliance evidence and migration flexibility. We'll also advise where AWS is not the smartest choice.
A few years ago you moved from a data centre to AWS, but many workloads still run as VM images on EC2. The next gains lie in modernisation: moving parts to containers, suitable processes to Lambda, batch work through Step Functions, and data pipelines that genuinely feel cloud-native. We help you decide what is worth modernising and what isn't.
For European customers, data residency is often not a detail but a precondition. AWS offers several regions within the EU: Frankfurt (eu-central-1) is the most widely used, while Stockholm (eu-north-1), Ireland (eu-west-1) and Paris (eu-west-3) are the other common choices. Which region suits you best depends on your customer base (latency), your legal context and sometimes practical matters such as the availability of certain services. It is not a case of "tick AWS Frankfurt and you're done" — data can inadvertently leak to other regions via logging, AI services or management tooling, and the architecture must be designed to prevent this.
For financial service providers, the DORA regulation has applied since 2025: digital operational resilience, exit strategies for critical ICT providers, structured incident reporting and third-party risk management. For healthcare providers, NEN 7510 remains the framework for information security, with additional requirements around patient data. The GDPR applies to all personal data. We help shape the AWS design so that it demonstrably supports these frameworks — not only at the moment the auditor comes calling.
One specific concern is vendor lock-in without an exit plan. Some AWS managed services gradually make it harder for an organisation to move away. That isn't necessarily a problem, but it is something to decide on deliberately. For every significant service choice, we make the dependency explicit: what open-source equivalent exists, what an exit would look like, and whether the benefits of the managed service outweigh the portability you give up. For us, vendor independence doesn't mean "avoid managed services"; it means "know what you're signing up for".
An initial conversation in which we understand where your AWS practice stands, which decision is on the table and what the constraints are: budget, compliance, team skills and timeline. This is followed by a short proposal phase in which we agree on the most suitable format: review, design or guided implementation.
We get read access to your AWS environment and review IaC repositories, IAM setup, network topology, cost reports and monitoring data. We also speak with cloud engineers, the security officer and application owners, not to know everything, but to ask the right questions.
In a few focused sessions we lay out the options: service choices, account structure, network blueprint, security baseline and deployment approach. No black-box analysis: your team makes the decisions together with us and keeps ownership of the design.
We translate the choices into a phased plan with sequencing, team allocation and investment. Concrete enough to take to the board or finance team, flexible enough to adjust as understanding grows.
If you wish, we stay on board for delivery, as a building partner, programme manager or interim cloud engineer. That way advice and execution sit with the same people, and the engagement only ends once the AWS environment runs in production and your team can continue building on it independently.
What clients usually ask us before we start: honest answers, no sales talk.
A thirty-minute introductory call, no obligation and no sales pressure. We listen to your situation, ask questions and point you in a useful direction, even if it turns out that working with us isn't the right next step, or that another cloud provider is a better fit.
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