Service · Software development

Cloud-native platform development.

Platforms built before the cloud, not on-premise software that happens to have been moved there. Container-based and horizontally scalable, with observability and deployment automation as first-class components. We design and build cloud-native platforms on AWS, GCP or Azure, vendor-neutral and based on what suits your organisation rather than what the hyperscaler wants to sell.

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What exactly is cloud-native?

Cloud-native software is software built for the cloud, not existing on-premise applications that have simply been moved to a virtual machine in AWS or Azure. The difference lies not in where the software runs but in how it is designed: in containers, split into loosely coupled services, with declarative infrastructure, automatic scaling and monitoring built in from day one. The term comes from the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, the consortium that also maintains Kubernetes, Prometheus, Envoy and OpenTelemetry.

A cloud-native architecture therefore looks very different from a classic application. Loosely coupled services communicate with each other via APIs, rather than one large application handling everything internally. Servers are treated as disposable, as immutable infrastructure, where every change is a new container rather than an SSH session into a production machine. Scaling happens horizontally: add ten small instances instead of one larger server. And security is built in through zero trust and the principle of least privilege, not through a firewall at the edge.

We build cloud-native platforms for organisations that want to future-proof their software landscape: scalable for unpredictable load, recoverable after incidents, observable in production and deployable without downtime. For organisations still running an old monolithic stack, this service relates to our legacy software replacement page, which describes how a phased transition to a modern stack can work without disrupting operations.

What distinguishes a cloud-native platform from a classic stack.

Containers

Each service in an immutable image, not installed on a machine

Horizontally scalable

Capacity grows by adding instances rather than enlarging servers

Observability up front

Logs, metrics and traces are first-class, not visible only once incidents occur

Declarative infrastructure

Infrastructure as Code, with no manual clicking in the cloud console

Three types of cloud-native projects.

The right route depends on whether you are starting greenfield, modernising an existing system or building a SaaS platform where multi-tenancy and compliance are central. The three patterns below together cover the vast majority of cloud-native projects we get involved in.

Approach 01

Greenfield platform development

A new product built from scratch on a cloud-native stack

You are starting a new SaaS product, a digital platform or an internal application designed from day one to grow with your organisation. We design the architecture as cloud-native: container-based services, an API gateway at the edge, a service mesh once the number of services justifies it, observability from the first sprint, and continuous deployment pipelines that take every commit through to staging and production. The result is a platform that can go live with a handful of users and scale to tens of thousands without re-architecting.

Choosing cloud-native for a greenfield project is not automatic. For compact business applications with stable load, it is overkill. We therefore begin with a design phase in which we examine expected load, multi-region requirements, availability targets and the size of the team that will maintain the system. In some situations, a straightforward Node.js or Python stack on a managed app service is sufficient. Our hire a Python developer and hire a Node.js developer pages describe how we also deliver those lighter routes.

Containers + KubernetesAPI gatewayCI/CD pipelinesObservability from the outsetMulti-tenancyGuided cloud selection

Approach 02

Application containerisation and migration to cloud-native

Modernising existing applications with containers and orchestration

You have an existing application that still runs on virtual machines or in a traditional monolithic setup, and you want to move to a container-based platform, typically Docker with Kubernetes orchestration. We containerise the existing application, design the Helm charts or GitOps manifests, configure routing and ingress properly, and migrate data to managed services where that makes sense. Where it is worthwhile, we decompose the monolith step by step towards microservices. This is not an end in itself, but applies where specific functions genuinely need to scale or deploy independently.

One point to note with containerisation services is that containerising itself is relatively straightforward. The complexity lies in the runtime: secrets management, persistent storage, networking between services, observability and the governance around who may deploy what. We take on that entire stack, rather than delivering only a Dockerfile and leaving the operational side to you. For components where integrations with external systems play a role, this service ties in with our smart API integrations.

DockerKubernetesHelm chartsGitOps + ArgoCDMonolith → microservicesService mesh

Approach 03

Enterprise platforms with compliance and multi-region requirements

For SaaS platforms and internal systems with demanding requirements

Multi-tenant SaaS architectures, platforms with compliance requirements (HIPAA, SOC 2, ISO 27001), or enterprise systems that must run across several regions for latency or data residency reasons. We build the platform layer beneath such products, with tenant isolation, fine-grained authorisation, audit logs for all sensitive actions, encryption at rest and in transit, automated backup and recovery procedures, and deployment pipelines with compliance checks built in. For organisations that need this level of robustness, this service also ties in with our broader route to custom enterprise software development.

Discussions on projects of this kind are rarely purely technical. We work closely with your security officer, DPO and internal IT, and keep architectural decisions explainable to auditors. We choose between AWS, GCP and Azure based on where your data arrangements already sit, where your IT team already has experience, and which services on each cloud are genuinely mature for your use case, rather than on which discounts the hyperscaler is offering this quarter.

Multi-tenancySOC 2 / ISO 27001Multi-regionZero trustAudit loggingDisaster recovery

What you have at the end.

A production-ready cloud-native platform, plus everything around it so you can manage it yourself or have us manage it for you.

Platform in production

Production, staging and development environments, either in your cloud account or hosted by us.

Codebase + IaC repository

Full source code, Terraform or Pulumi modules and Helm charts under your control.

Observability stack

Dashboards, alerting, log aggregation and distributed tracing — operational from day one.

Runbook + architecture documentation

Clear documentation for your IT team: deployments, incidents, escalation paths.

Managed service (optional)

Monitoring, security patching, capacity tuning and ongoing development under contract.

When cloud-native is the right choice.

Four patterns in which a cloud-native architecture clearly offers an advantage over a traditional server-based setup — and where we usually steer our clients in this direction.

Scaling

Unpredictable or peak-sensitive load

E-commerce platforms with sales events, ticketing systems around live events, financial platforms around tax deadlines, B2C products with marketing campaigns that could go viral. For this kind of load, being able to scale horizontally — and scale back down just as quickly — is the difference between a successful day and an infrastructure bill of thousands of euros for capacity you only needed for a few hours.

Geography

Multi-region or data residency requirements

You serve customers across several continents and want to keep latency low, or you work with data that must remain within a specific region for legal reasons. Cloud-native architectures make multi-region deployment manageable — services can be spread geographically without redesigning the entire application.

Availability

High availability requirements

A platform that drives your customers' operations or your own organisation, where downtime directly costs money or causes operational damage. Cloud-native designs — with self-healing, automatic failover, zero-downtime rolling deployments and automated backups — make it feasible to genuinely meet uptime targets without an operations team of twenty.

Teams

Multiple teams developing in parallel

When three or more development teams work on the same codebase, a monolith becomes increasingly costly to maintain. Microservices and independently deployable components — built on a cloud-native infrastructure — allow teams to work and release in parallel without blocking one another. For small teams or standalone products, this is often more overkill than advantage, incidentally.

When cloud-native is not the right choice.

An honest perspective: cloud-native is not a religion, and in a number of situations it causes more pain than gain. Here are four patterns in which we explicitly advise clients to choose a simpler path.

Stable load

Compact business app with predictable usage

An internal tool with a few hundred users, a quotation portal, a scheduling tool for a single team — for these, a cloud-native platform with Kubernetes and a service mesh is more than you need. A simple Node.js or Python application on a managed app service will do the job at a fraction of the operational overhead.

MVP stage

Start-up or new product in the validation phase

For a product that still has to prove it has market fit, investing in a mature cloud-native stack is often over-engineering. The energy is better spent on product development and early customer feedback, not on a library of Helm charts. In such cases we happily begin with something minimal — a well-structured monolith on a simple cloud runtime — and only migrate to cloud-native once scale justifies it.

Single-tenant

On-premise or single-tenant deployment

Sometimes the software must run on-premise or in a dedicated VPC at the client's site for compliance, security or contractual reasons. Cloud-native principles remain useful in such a context, but many benefits — managed services, elastic scaling, multi-tenant cost advantages — fall away. We then opt for a hybrid approach in which we still use containers and IaC, but leave out the more complex layers.

Team capacity

Your small internal IT team maintaining the stack

A cloud-native platform needs a team to run it after go-live too, or an external partner to take over operations under contract. For organisations without DevOps capacity and without a wish to outsource it, a simpler stack is often a better choice than an elegant cloud-native setup that gradually slips into neglect.

How a cloud-native project works.

01Introduction→ 02Architecture→ 03Build & deploy→ 04Production & operations

Step 01

Introduction

Which platform do you want to build or modernise, what scale and availability requirements apply, and what does your current cloud setup look like?

Step 02

Architecture & cloud selection

Reference architecture, vendor choice between AWS / GCP / Azure, scope per service, observability approach and an initial IaC skeleton.

Step 03

Building in sprints

Each sprint delivers a working build to staging, container pipelines are set up, security checks are automated, and observability dashboards grow alongside the product.

Step 04

Production & operations

Phased rollout, on-call arrangements agreed, ongoing operations or handover to your internal team, depending on what suits you best.

Stack we work with.

For each project we choose what fits: vendor-neutral, based on where your team already has experience, which managed services are mature in your chosen cloud, and which compliance requirements apply. No dogma about one framework or one hyperscaler.

Containers, orchestration & mesh

DockerKubernetesHelmArgoCDIstioLinkerdKnative

API gateway, IaC & CI/CD

KongApigeeAWS API GatewayAzure API MgmtTerraformPulumiGitHub ActionsGitLab CI

Observability & cloud

PrometheusGrafanaLokiTempoOpenTelemetryDatadogAWSGCPAzure

Frequently asked questions.

What exactly is cloud-native, and how does it differ from simply "running in the cloud"?

An application that runs on a virtual machine in AWS, Azure or GCP is "in the cloud", but not cloud-native. Cloud-native means the software is designed for the specific characteristics of cloud environments: containers instead of permanently installed processes, loosely coupled services instead of one large application, declarative infrastructure instead of manual configuration, and observability built in rather than added afterwards. The Cloud Native Computing Foundation, the consortium behind Kubernetes, Prometheus, Envoy and OpenTelemetry, summarises it as software designed to be scalable, restartable and extensible in a dynamic environment.

What does cloud-native architecture look like in practice?

Cloud-native architecture is defined by seven principles that usually occur in combination. First: loosely coupled services that communicate via APIs rather than one monolith. Second: horizontal scaling, where capacity grows by adding instances rather than enlarging servers. Third: fault tolerance by design, with automatic failover and self-healing. Fourth: immutable infrastructure, where every change is a new container rather than an adjustment to a running server. Fifth: declarative APIs and infrastructure as code. Sixth: observability as a first-class concern, with logs, metrics and traces from day one. Seventh: security based on zero trust and the principle of least privilege, not a perimeter firewall. Not every principle is necessary in every situation, but the combination is what sets cloud-native apart from an ordinary cloud deployment.

When is cloud-native worthwhile for our organisation?

Cloud-native pays off mainly where load is unpredictable or spiky, where you have multi-region requirements or high availability demands, where several teams work in parallel, and where the software needs a long lifespan. For compact business apps with stable load, MVPs still being validated, and single-tenant on-premise deployments, a simpler stack is often the better choice; cloud-native quickly becomes overengineering there. That is why we always start with a brief architecture discussion before embarking on a project: not every software problem needs a cloud-native answer.

Which cloud do you choose: AWS, GCP or Azure?

We are vendor-neutral and choose per project. Three criteria weigh most heavily. First: where your existing data contracts and infrastructure sit. Moving an Azure-only IT organisation to AWS for a single platform rarely leads to a good outcome. Second: which managed services are mature in which cloud for your use case. Google Cloud, for example, excels in data and AI, AWS has the broadest service catalogue, and Azure offers the best integration with Microsoft ecosystems. Third: contractual and compliance considerations such as data residency, encryption key management and audit capabilities. We never simply lock you into one cloud, and we make sure the IaC and application layers remain portable in principle.

What does it cost to run a cloud-native platform in terms of cloud runtime?

Runtime costs vary considerably by platform and usage pattern, and good architectural choices often make a multiple of difference to your monthly bill. A few things we include as standard: spot instances or preemptible nodes for batch work, automatic scale-down outside office hours where possible, managed databases sized correctly rather than oversized clusters, and cost dashboards that give insight per team or per service. We would rather build a platform whose costs are well observable than one that turns out to be inexplicably expensive after three months. For larger projects, we include a FinOps review in the architecture phase.

How do you approach security and compliance in a cloud-native platform?

Security operates on several layers. At the infrastructure level: IaC with security baselines, private networking, encryption at rest and in transit as standard, and secrets held in a vault (HashiCorp Vault or the native equivalent in your cloud). At the platform level: zero-trust authentication between services, the principle of least privilege for service accounts, and audit logs for all sensitive actions. At the pipeline level: automated SAST and SCA checks, container image scanning and dependency monitoring. For compliance projects (SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA), we build the controls in from the start, so that audits later do not require us to reopen the architecture.

How long does a cloud-native project take?

That depends heavily on the scope and the starting point. A greenfield platform with a clearly defined first use case can be in production within a few sprints with a first working version, after which we build on what users learn. Migrating an existing application to Kubernetes with containerisation and GitOps usually requires a project of several sprints, with a phased production rollout. An enterprise multi-tenant platform with compliance requirements is always a longer project; there, the first phase is largely taken up by architecture, the security baseline and the first service rather than breadth. We give an honest estimate after the architecture phase; before that phase, any figure is a guess.

Can you migrate an existing monolith to cloud-native step by step?

Yes, and in practice that is the most common route. We containerise the existing application as it is — that brings immediate gains in deployability and reproducibility. Then we design the target platform and decompose the monolith only where it adds concrete value: sub-functions that need to scale independently, or sub-functions maintained by other teams. We don't extract microservices for their own sake — every service carries operational overhead, and that overhead has to be justified by something worthwhile. The migration itself runs in parallel with the existing application so that operations never grind to a halt — we also describe that pattern on our legacy page.

What about ownership and vendor lock-in?

You retain full ownership. The code, the IaC repository, the Helm charts and the cloud account are all in your name — we work in an environment you control or that we hand over at the end. As for the choice of cloud itself, we make sure the application and IaC remain portable in principle: we use open standards wherever possible (Kubernetes, OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Terraform), and we make any use of cloud-specific services explicit in the architecture documentation, so you know where a future move to another cloud would require work. Managed operations are always a service you can take or leave, never a dependency we hold you to.

Talk to us about your cloud-native platform.

A free, no-obligation half-hour introductory call. We listen to what you want to build or modernise, take a brief look at your cloud context and point you in a useful direction — even if it turns out a simpler stack is the better choice for now.

Schedule an introductory call Email fabian.vandijk@appfront.nl