Cloud Platform Operations
When building and managing modern cloud infrastructure, it’s crucial to ensure it remains reliable, scalable, and up to date to meet evolving business and operational needs. Provisioning is just the beginning; ongoing maintenance, updates, and support are essential to keep your infrastructure robust and secure.
We help our customers design, develop, and maintain cloud infrastructure on AWS, GCP, and Azure. This includes provisioning resources, performing regular updates to Kubernetes environments, and updating other components like databases as needed. We provide timely support to resolve issues, ensure smooth operations, and keep our expertise aligned with the unique solutions of our customers. We are always prepared to collaborate, align, and suggest optimizations for their infrastructure.
Included Services
Configuration Management
VSHN provides a Terraform base framework to provision cloud services and manage their configuration. Benefit from our existing library of Terraform Modules and experience in Infrastructure as Code, as well as from our system documentation and standardization.
Service Version Update Handling
Systems have to be updated and maintained. This is not just true for local instances but also for cloud services. While certain services are handled automatically, other updates have to be planned and executed in order not to interrupt the service.
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For the Kubernetes offerings, this is an included part of our service.
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Maintenance of the other cloud provider services is billed.
Quarterly Review Sessions
We connect with your team in a quarterly sync or workshop to prioritize problem-solving, improvements, challenge the current setup, suggest, and plan improvements.
Ready to Support and Engineer
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Through our Configuration Management, documentation, and training, we’re ready to support, make changes, and improve the cloud environment on demand.
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We know the ins and outs of your cloud environment.
Supported Cloud Providers and Services
For a list of currently supported cloud service providers and services, check out our Supported Services Overview.
Support and Professional Services
The following engineering and support services are available on request, billed by the hour.
Support and Incident Handling
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Our experts are available 24x7 (depending on the VSHN Support Plan) to support and help bring your systems back into a running state.
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We track incidents and problems that you requested support for on our side in tickets and classify them accordingly. Providing this level of Problem Management allows us to spot similar problems and use synergies in addressing issues across all our customers and deployments.
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VSHN can handle communication with the cloud service provider to support resolving issues.
Optionally, VSHN can react on our own to defined monitoring alerts, see Option: Monitoring Alert Handling.
Design, Engineering, and Change Management
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We support hands-on in creating and operating your cloud environment end to end — from provisioning to day-to-day operations — so you can focus on your core business.
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We’re ready to help you with our know-how to design, plan, execute, and solve infrastructure changes, the addition of new services, cloud issues, and assist with improvements and changes to your setup.
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We define and engineer useful metrics and monitoring concepts, so you always know the status of your platform and get alerted on problems. Optionally, we can also react to defined alerts, see Option: Monitoring Alert Handling.
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We are ready to engineer solutions tailored to your needs and implement changes on your request. Based on our documentation and by having access to your code and deployment repositories, we can assist, engineer, and reconfigure things in your setup for you.
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We keep the shared documentation up to date.
Option: Monitoring Alert Handling
Incidents are an unfortunate truth of running infrastructure and platform. While we support creating meaningful metrics, dashboards, and monitoring, not every organization is ready or wants to handle platform monitoring alerts. We optionally offer to receive such alerts 24x7 at VSHN and have our engineers get active to resolve the issue.
Variant: Dedicated Professional Service
As an addition to VSHN best practices, shared documentation, and being served by VSHN teams, a VSHN DevOps Specialist becomes the dedicated go-to person for you — an expert in your cloud environment. This engineer knows your setup and keeps themselves up to date. This person will join your quarterly (and on-demand) syncs and is there to answer your questions and work with you on planned tasks.
The Dedicated DevOps Engineer reviews changes made to your setup and updates system documentation. The engineer is prepared to address questions and issues during the syncs with you.
Pricing
We charge a monthly retainer fee to maintain documentation, review periodically with you, and be ready to support — optionally 24x7.
| Standard | Dedicated Professional Service |
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In the context of this Solution, an environment refers to a complete, independently deployable instance of the application and its supporting infrastructure. This typically includes runtime components such as databases, caches, queues, storage, monitoring, and access controls — all configured to serve a specific purpose like development, staging, or production. See Multiple or different Environments.
Options
| Option | Price |
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Optional: 24x7 Incident Handling with a Support Plan Priority. Does not include actual incident response effort, which is billed by the hour. |
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Requirements
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We need to understand your application setup and deployment in order to be ready to support you on demand. Doing a review of your deployment and then engineering and adapting your deployment together ensures that it’s aligned with our best practices and that we have the required documentation. We cannot simply support an environment that wasn’t built by or in collaboration with VSHN.
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Collaboration, especially for change requests, etc., happens through the VSHN ticket system.
Constraints and Limitations
Manual Effort by VSHN
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Billed by the hour, according to VSHN standard rates
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Isolated, smaller changes (<1h effort) are usually implemented within a business day
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For larger collaboration and engineering, work is planned into upcoming sprints. We clarify importance and urgency with you and inform you regarding the timeline
Kubernetes Maintenance
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This only includes the standard updates; work to ensure compatibility with the customer’s workload is billed separately
VSHN Documentation
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Limited to documentation updates based on changes discovered or discussed during collaboration, reported to VSHN, or done collaboratively on your setup
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Format follows VSHN standards, defined by VSHN — to ensure usability by VSHN engineers across setups and customers
Scope
This support focuses on solutions consisting of services provided by the cloud provider. We currently support a selection of services from AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and Exoscale. Other cloud providers on request.
Multiple or different Environments
Each environment may differ in terms of:
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Purpose (e.g., development, staging, production)
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Configuration or scale (e.g., smaller test instance vs. full production setup)
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Runtime isolation (separate namespaces, clusters, or cloud resources)
We treat an environment as a separate unit if it requires:
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Independent deployment and maintenance processes
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Distinct runtime infrastructure or cloud resources
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Dedicated support or monitoring setup
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Different cloud service providers
This classification helps us estimate effort, plan support, and apply consistent practices across each instance of the application.