Most production trouble we see isn't in the code. It's a server nobody has logged into for two years, a deploy that only one person knows how to run, and a backup that has never been restored. We fix that part: containers, pipelines, alerts, and a cloud bill you can explain.
We keep seven platforms running in production across Kuwait, Pakistan and the USA — an e-learning system streaming HLS video to thousands of students, a two-sided veterinary marketplace taking card payments, freight software that files invoices with a government tax service. None of those have a dedicated operations department behind them. They have a handful of engineers, which is why our setups have to be simple enough that a busy team keeps using them under pressure.
That shapes the work. For DVM Central we containerised the Laravel back end and Next.js storefront and deploy them on DigitalOcean, so the thing running locally is the same thing running for customers. Elsewhere it is AWS — EC2 behind Apache, S3 for media, managed MySQL, certificates that renew themselves. We pick the boring option on purpose and write down how it works.
We size and build the whole environment: compute, managed MySQL, object storage on S3 or Spaces, DNS, SSL and firewall rules. Small enough to be affordable at today's traffic, shaped so growth doesn't mean starting again.
Applications are containerised so local, staging and production run the same image, and "works on my machine" stops being an argument. DVM Central's Laravel and Next.js stack runs this way on DigitalOcean, and a new engineer is productive in an afternoon rather than a week.
Push to a branch, tests run, the image builds, the release goes out with database migrations in the right order and a rollback path behind it. Releases become routine instead of an event people schedule around.
Sentry for application errors, uptime and SSL expiry checks, disk, queue and backup alerts routed to someone who can act. We have watched an expired certificate take down an API, an admin panel and a mobile app at the same moment — that check now goes on every setup we touch.
Automated backups are the easy half of the job. We test the restore, record how long a full recovery actually takes, and keep migrations reversible so a bad release is an inconvenience rather than a crisis.
Video and large files move to Bunny CDN or object storage instead of hammering your application servers, while queues and caching take pressure off MySQL. Then we right-size instances, because most cloud bills are paying for headroom nobody uses.
Read access to servers, DNS, database and repository, then a written description of how a release currently happens — including the manual steps nobody admits to. Most of the real risk surfaces in this first week.
Dockerfiles, compose or service definitions, environment variables in a proper secret store, provisioning steps committed to your repository. Nothing important should live only in one engineer's shell history.
We build the pipeline and a staging environment that genuinely matches production, rehearse the release there, then move traffic in a planned window with a rollback ready. Cutovers happen during your quiet hours, not ours.
Alerts wired to the people who can respond, a runbook covering deploy, rollback, logs and restore, and a working session with your team. After that you either run it yourselves or keep us on monthly cover.
An hour on a call is usually enough to tell you what's oversized, what's fragile, and what we'd change first. You get that read whether or not you hire us.