Cloud infrastructure and DevOps in Sydney
Sydney's customers expect their bank, their insurer and their payments app to be there at any hour, and an outage on payday is remembered long after it is fixed. Most firms have backups and a recovery plan on paper. Many have never restored their main database under time pressure to see how long it really takes, or failed over to a second region and back again.
We set up infrastructure as code, with backups that are restored on a schedule rather than assumed, failover that has actually been tested, and runbooks someone other than us can follow. We run the drills with your team and write up what happened and how long each step took, so the plan on paper matches what the systems can do. We operate our own Kubernetes cluster for Amour, so our advice comes from running production ourselves.
Sydney is where Australian money keeps its head office. Commonwealth Bank, Westpac and Macquarie run their groups from the city, the large insurers are here, and around them sits a dense fintech sector in payments, lending and wealth. The software these firms need is rarely a brand-new product. It is the work around the core: payment flows that settle in seconds, onboarding and lending journeys customers actually finish, reports that agree with each other, and the internal tools that keep claims and complaints moving.
Real-time payments have raised the bar. On the New Payments Platform money moves in seconds, and PayTo lets a business take agreed payments straight from a customer's account, so a lender or fintech built around overnight batch files now needs instant confirmations and a ledger that never records the same payment twice. Sydney is also where Atlassian and Canva started, so its buyers have been trained by good software built down the road. A clunky internal tool or a slow sign-up flow is noticed here in a way it might not be elsewhere. Beyond finance, the city has a large property and strata sector, online retailers shipping across a very big country, and a startup scene around Tech Central.
Hiring reflects all of that. Indeed puts the average base salary for a software engineer in Sydney at A$119,602, from 526 reported salaries, and experienced engineers are contested by the banks, the big product companies and every well-funded startup at once. A team that needs a payments engineer or an extra pair of senior hands for a quarter can wait a long time for the right hire. That is where we are useful: a defined piece of work, started within days, with the code in your repositories from the first commit.
Our four hours of daily overlap land in your afternoon, and we move them to suit your team. Your morning stays with your own people; the afternoon is when you talk to the engineer writing your code, in stand-ups, reviews and design decisions. Runbooks and architecture notes are written as we go, so whoever joins your team next inherits work they can read.
We are the right fit when you have a defined piece of work and want senior engineers on it within days, or when the Sydney hire you need is months away and the roadmap keeps moving. Start with a fixed-price two-week piece and judge us on the output. 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 Sydney teams.
How do you work with teams in Sydney?+
We are in Bengaluru and share four hours of live overlap with you every day, in your afternoon, moved to suit your team. That is when we join stand-ups, review pull requests and take design calls. We work in your tools, whether that is Slack, GitHub or Linear, and the person on every call is the engineer who writes the code. Between calls, progress is in your tracker and your repositories.
Do you build for Sydney banks, insurers and fintechs?+
Yes, and that is most of what Sydney asks us for. We build payment backends that handle NPP and PayTo without recording a payment twice, sign-up and lending journeys customers finish on their phone, complaint and claims tools that take the reading off skilled staff, and data pipelines that make finance and risk reports agree. We work inside your codebase and your cloud, starting with the one flow that matters most.
How does your rate compare to hiring in Sydney?+
Indeed puts the average base salary for a software engineer in Sydney at around A$120,000. 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 starts within days of the call. The first piece is a fixed-price two-week engagement at $2,800, so you judge us on what ships.
Can you take over an app another team built?+
Yes. It is a common starting point for Sydney products whose agency or founding engineers have moved on. We read the code, run it, and write down how it fits together and where the risks sit. The first fixed-price two-week piece is usually one real fix or feature, so you see the handover working while the architecture notes build up. The code stays in your repositories throughout, as it always would.
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.