Platform Engineering and Infrastructure as Code on Microsoft Azure

Azure platform work usually stalls on unresolved decisions rather than on build effort. We resolve them with evidence taken from your own subscriptions.

• Compare Bicep and Terraform against your estate: whether it is Azure-only, who maintains the modules, existing Terraform investment and your appetite for protecting state.
• Compare Azure DevOps and GitHub against how your teams actually work, including where repositories, pipelines and boards are already embedded and what a move would break.
• Read Azure activity logs to establish how many resource changes currently arrive outside a pipeline, broken down by subscription and by team.
• Reconcile deployed resources against the code base and list what is unmanaged, duplicated or orphaned, with an owner assigned to each item.
• Review management group and subscription structure, naming, tagging and existing Azure Policy assignments against what the pipeline will need to enforce.
• Produce a sequenced plan with effort, dependencies, commercial case and the measures that will define success.

We build the module library, the pipelines and the runtime foundations together, proving each on a real workload before it becomes the standard.

• Build a versioned Bicep or Terraform module library published to a registry, with pinned versions and a tested upgrade path for the teams consuming it.
• Configure remote state with locking, restricted access and a documented, rehearsed recovery procedure wherever Terraform is used.
• Build pipelines in Azure Pipelines or GitHub Actions that run what-if or plan, publish the output for review, gate on environment approval, then apply.
• Stand up Azure Container Registry with tag locking, retention rules and Microsoft Defender for Cloud image scanning, then deploy to Azure Kubernetes Service or Azure Container Apps by digest rather than by floating tag.
• Define Azure Policy as code alongside the infrastructure modules, so a control ships with the resource pattern it governs instead of arriving later.
• Rebuild a non-production environment into an empty subscription straight from the repository to prove the platform, and record the elapsed time.

Pipeline identity and secret handling are where Azure delivery platforms most often carry avoidable risk. We remove the standing credentials first, then tighten scope.

• Move pipelines to Microsoft Entra workload identity federation, so no client secret or certificate is stored in Azure DevOps or GitHub.
• Scope each deployment identity to the subscription, resource group and role it needs, and remove inherited owner assignments left over from initial setup.
• Store application secrets, keys and certificates in Azure Key Vault, reference them at run time, subscribe to its near-expiry events and schedule the secret rotation the vault does not perform on its own.
• Assign Azure Policy at management group level with deny and audit effects agreed in advance, and prove each policy in a sandbox subscription before promotion.
• Enforce branch protection, mandatory review and protected environment approvals, so a release to production always requires a second person.
• Map Azure Policy compliance and pipeline controls to the framework your customers ask about, such as the Essential Eight, to support your assurance work. We help you align to a framework rather than certify against one.

The platform succeeds when a delivery team can create a new service without asking permission and without asking how. We build that path, then teach it.

• Publish a template repository containing the pipeline, module references, policy checks, Azure Container Registry access and Key Vault wiring, ready to clone.
• Pair-build the first two or three service pipelines with your engineers, so the patterns are learned during the build rather than read afterwards.
• Run working sessions on reading what-if and plan output, so the people approving a deployment understand what they are approving.
• Write runbooks for failed deployments, stuck state locks, rollback in Azure Container Apps and AKS, and revoked or expired federated credentials.
• Hand over with your team performing a production deployment and a subscription rebuild while we observe and only advise.
• Track the share of Azure resource changes arriving through the pipeline and report it against the baseline captured during assessment.

Under an agreed managed scope we keep the Azure platform current, because version pins, policy exemptions and cluster support windows all expire on somebody else's schedule.

• Track AKS version support windows, node image releases and add-on compatibility, scheduling upgrades before a version leaves standard support.
• Keep Bicep, Terraform provider, module and container base image versions current, tested in a lower environment before production.
• Run scheduled drift detection across subscriptions and either return the change to code or record an accepted exception with an owner.
• Review Azure Policy compliance and exemptions monthly, closing the temporary exemptions that have outlived their reason.
• Track pipeline duration and failure rate in Azure DevOps pipeline analytics or GitHub Actions run history and act on the recurring failures instead of retrying them, using Application Insights to catch releases that degraded the workload after a successful deploy.
• Report Azure cost by environment and workload, including non-production resources that could be scheduled off, resized or retired.