Cloud infrastructure and DevOps in Perth
The business systems around a Western Australian operation (maintenance planning, reporting, the contractor portal, the shutdown schedule) often grew up on a server in a West Perth office or a single cloud machine someone set up years ago. Site teams hundreds of kilometres away depend on them, and when one goes down in the middle of a shutdown, crews stand waiting on a screen that will not load.
We move those systems onto infrastructure written as code, with access through named accounts and multi-factor sign-in, backups restored on a schedule, monitoring that tells you before the site does, and recovery tested and written up. Runbooks are written as we build, so your own team can run it all after we step back. We operate our own Kubernetes cluster for Amour, so our runbooks come from running systems ourselves.
Perth runs mines it cannot see. Rio Tinto controls trains, trucks and drills in the Pilbara from its operations centre in Perth, BHP runs much of its Western Australian iron ore logistics from a remote operations centre in the city, and Woodside, Fortescue and Chevron Australia keep their head offices here. Around them sits a large sector of engineering consultancies, contractors and mining equipment, technology and services firms. Most of the software work in the city exists to serve that industry, and it comes with that industry's habits: safety first, careful change control and very little tolerance for downtime.
The line that matters is between operational technology and everything else. Control systems, autonomous haulage and plant automation belong to specialists. The opportunity for outside engineers is on the business side of that line: maintenance and shutdown planning, historian data read out for analysis, contractor and workforce systems for a fly-in fly-out workforce, reporting, and the internal tools that stitch them together. Energy and utility businesses need the same kind of work, and beyond resources the state has its own buyers, from agencies and universities in the city to the wineries of Margaret River selling across the continent.
Hiring is shaped by the resources sector, which competes hard for experienced engineers and can pay for them. Indeed puts the average base salary for a software engineer in Perth at A$100,253, from 59 reported salaries, and a consultancy or scale-up bidding against a mining major for the same person often waits a long time. That is where we fit: senior engineers on a defined piece of work within days, with the code in your repositories from the first commit.
Our four hours of daily overlap land in your afternoon, moved to suit your team. Perth is the closest Australian capital to India's time zone, and neither Western Australia nor India uses daylight saving, so the window sits at the same point in your day all year. Your morning is for your own team and the site calls; the afternoon is for stand-ups, reviews and decisions with the engineer who writes your code.
We are the right fit for defined work on the business side of the operation: data, reporting, maintenance and workforce tools, and contractor systems. Senior engineers start within days, the first piece is a fixed-price two weeks, and we can carry the roadmap through the months before your own hire starts. Agencies can put the work under their own name.
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 Perth teams.
How do you work with teams in Perth?+
We are in Bengaluru, and four hours of every working day overlap with your afternoon, moved to suit your team. Perth is the closest Australian capital to India's time, and neither side changes its clocks, so the window stays put all year. Stand-ups, code reviews and design calls happen live in it. We work in your tools, whether that is Slack, GitHub or Linear, and every call is with the engineer who writes the code.
Do you build for mining and energy companies?+
Yes, on the business side of the operation. We build pipelines that read historian data out for analysis, maintenance and shutdown planning tools, contractor management platforms, apps that put a FIFO worker's roster, flights and documents in one place, and dense planning views for remote operations teams. We integrate with the maintenance, HR and procurement systems you already run, and start with the problem that costs you most on site.
How does your rate compare to hiring in Perth?+
Indeed puts the average base salary for a software engineer in Perth at around A$100,000, and the resources sector often pays more to win experienced people. Our published rate is $35/hour with a $5,000 minimum, or $5,400 a month for one embedded engineer. There is no recruiting time and no employment overhead, and work can start within days. The first piece is a fixed-price two-week engagement at $2,800, so you judge us on what ships.
What do the first two weeks look like?+
You share the context, with an NDA signed before anything specific. Within two days you are on a 30-minute call with the engineer who would do the work, and within a week you have a written plan. Then comes a fixed-price two-week piece for $2,800: one real thing, such as a maintenance report, a contractor portal screen or a data feed, built in your repositories and reviewed with you in your afternoons.
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.