Cloud infrastructure and DevOps in Manchester
Peak trading is where infrastructure decisions made in March get tested in November. For a Manchester retailer, the weeks around Black Friday can carry a large share of the year's revenue, and the platform has to scale for them and then scale back down before the January bill arrives. The usual problems are not exotic: a database sized for the average day, a deployment nobody dares run during peak, and no rehearsal.
We set up infrastructure as code, load-test against last year's peak traffic, and put autoscaling and caching where they actually help. We make deployment boring enough that you can still ship a fix during the sale. After peak, we look at what you paid for and did not use. We operate our own Kubernetes cluster for Amour, so the runbooks we hand over are ones we would follow ourselves.
Manchester's software market has two centres of gravity, a tram ride apart. MediaCityUK in Salford is home to BBC North and ITV, and to the production companies, post houses and broadcast suppliers that grew up around them. Their systems are about media and rights: asset libraries, scheduling, metadata that has to follow a programme from edit to broadcast to streaming, and the comments, votes and uploads that now come with so many shows. Anything that hosts what the public posts needs moderation designed in from the first episode, because the busiest night is usually the launch.
The other centre is online retail. Greater Manchester is home to THG, boohoo, AO and Auto Trader, and that concentration has produced a generation of engineers and smaller brands who think in conversion rates, warehouse cut-offs and peak trading. The mid-sized retailers we hear from have usually outgrown their first platform in stages, and the joins between the shop, the warehouse and the finance system are where the money leaks. Between the broadcasters and the retailers sit the city's digital agencies, building for clients across the North and London, and they often need engineering capacity for a quarter rather than another permanent seat.
Hiring here is cheaper than London but not cheap. ITJobsWatch puts the median advertised salary for a software engineer in Manchester at £75,000 over the six months to September 2026, and GCHQ, which opened its Manchester site in 2019, now competes for the same security-minded engineers. Retailers and agencies feel the squeeze most in the run-up to peak, when a build has a fixed date and a permanent hire would arrive after it.
Working with us from Manchester fits the day you already have. Four hours of every working day overlap with yours, set across your morning, so stand-up, review and decisions happen live with the engineer who writes the code. The afternoon runs on pull requests and written updates in your own Slack, GitHub and Linear, waiting for you when you get back from lunch, with runbooks and architecture notes written as the work goes.
We are the right fit for a defined build, a deadline before peak, or a quarter of extra senior capacity for an agency that has won more work than it can staff. Start with a fixed-price two-week piece and judge us on the result. For agencies, we work white-label under your name, in your repositories and your tools.
Four ways this arrives.
Resources were created in the console over several years and nobody can say which ones matter. We inventory the account, bring what is live into Terraform, remove what is not, and hand you a repository that describes the whole estate.
It is usually idle capacity, oversized instances, forgotten environments and data transfer nobody priced. We find where the money goes, cut the obvious waste where you already are, and only then ask whether a cheaper provider such as Hetzner suits your steady workloads.
One person knows the steps and every release waits for them. We build a pipeline that tests, builds and deploys on merge, with rollback to the previous image, so shipping on a Friday afternoon is a decision rather than a gamble.
The channel fires all day, so everyone has muted it, so real outages are reported by customers. We alert on what users actually feel, route each alert to a named owner, and delete every alert nobody would act on at 3am.
A K3s cluster on Hetzner that we provisioned and are on call for, deployed through Flux, where only a push to master can produce an image production will run.
Read the write-up →Asked by Manchester teams.
How do you work with teams in Manchester?+
Four hours of every working day overlap with yours, set across your Manchester morning, so stand-up and review happen live. We join your calls and work in your tools: Slack, GitHub and Linear. You talk directly to the engineer who writes the code. When you get back from lunch, the afternoon's work is waiting in pull requests, with notes on what changed and why, and runbooks written as we go.
Do you build for Manchester retailers and media companies?+
Yes. For online retailers we build the joins that decide the margin: stock that is right across the website, marketplaces and warehouse, returns that flow back into sellable stock, and order data that reconciles with the 3PL and the payment provider. For broadcasters and suppliers at MediaCityUK we build content and rights metadata services, delivery APIs for streaming partners, and audience features with moderation designed in.
How does your rate compare to hiring in Manchester?+
ITJobsWatch puts the median advertised salary for a software engineer in Manchester at around £75,000. Our published rate is $35/hour with a $5,000 minimum, or $5,400 a month for one engineer embedded in your team. There is no recruiting time and no employment overhead, and we can start within days of the first call. A fixed-price two-week piece at $2,800 lets you judge us on output first.
Can you take over a platform a Manchester agency built?+
Yes. In Manchester a retail or media platform often outlives the agency that built it, so this is familiar work. After a 30-minute call with the engineer, we read the code, run it, and write down how it actually works: architecture notes, the risky paths and what we would change first. That becomes a written plan within a week. A fixed-price two-week piece then ships the first real change.
Should we run our own Kubernetes cluster?+
Usually not. Self-hosting starts to pay when your managed bill is mostly things you do not use, your workloads are steady rather than spiky, and someone is willing to own the control plane. We run our own on Hetzner, so we know what that job involves. If nobody on your side wants it, managed is cheaper in total even when the invoice is larger.
Do we need Kubernetes at all?+
Often not. Plenty of products are better served by a managed container service, a platform like Railway, or two virtual machines and a good deploy script. Kubernetes earns its place when you run several services, have steady traffic and have people to look after it. We will recommend the least infrastructure that does the job, and say so when that is less than you expected.
Which clouds do you work with?+
AWS most often, then Google Cloud, Azure and Hetzner. We work in whichever one you are already on, because moving clouds is rarely the cheapest fix for a cost or reliability problem. If we think a move is worth it, we will show you the case using your own bill before anyone migrates anything.
Can you cut our cloud bill without a migration?+
Usually, yes. Most of a bill that has grown unchecked is idle capacity, oversized instances, environments left running and data transfer nobody priced, and all of that is fixed where you already are. We will not promise a percentage before we have read the bill. After the first week we can tell you what is realistic and what it takes to get there.
Who is on call?+
Whoever the engagement says, in writing. While we run your infrastructure it can be us, with hours and response times agreed up front. If you are taking it in-house, the handover includes the runbooks, the alert routing and a rota your team can actually staff. We do not leave behind a pager that only we know how to answer.