Production cloud architecture.
Reference architectures matched to your traffic, latency, and compliance posture. Terraform or Pulumi for everything that touches infra; no clicking in consoles for production.
Cloud Solutions
Production cloud architecture — Cloudflare, AWS, Vercel, layered for what each does best.
Cloud infrastructure for product teams who need edge speed, origin reliability, and operational cost they can defend at the board meeting. Novura Studios architects production cloud on the 2026 modern stack: Cloudflare for the edge, AWS or GCP for origin compute, Vercel for the app layer. CI/CD, observability with OpenTelemetry, autoscaling that actually scales, and FinOps tuning that compounds.
- Edge layer: Cloudflare Workers, R2, D1, KV, Durable Objects, Zero Trust.
- Origin layer: AWS (Lambda, ECS, EKS, RDS, Aurora) or GCP (Cloud Run, GKE, BigQuery).
- App layer: Vercel for Next.js apps — preview deploys, edge functions, observability built in.
- IaC: Terraform or Pulumi; GitHub Actions for CI/CD.
- FinOps: cost tuning as a deliverable, not an afterthought. 20–40% reduction on first engagement is common.
The Modern Stack
The modern product-team cloud stack.
Layered, composed, and explicit — each provider doing what it's actually good at.
For a decade the cloud conversation was “pick AWS or GCP or Azure.” In 2026 that framing leaves performance and cost on the table. The product-team stack that wins on both is layered: Cloudflare at the edge for the request boundary (auth checks, rewrites, personalization, CDN, R2 storage), AWS or GCP at origin for the stateful work that needs to live near a database, and Vercel as the app layer for Next.js workloads where preview deployments and edge functions matter.
We don't pretend this is “multi-cloud” in the resilience sense — running the same workload across two clouds is almost always more cost than benefit. It's a composition: each provider doing what it's actually good at. The architecture is explicit, documented, and changes are versioned in Terraform or Pulumi.
What We Deliver
Five layers. One production cloud.
Reference architecture, CI/CD, observability, FinOps, security — sequenced so each layer compounds.
CI/CD pipelines.
GitHub Actions for build, test, security scan, and deploy. Vercel for Next.js previews. Per-PR environments where they pay back. Rollback as a one-click operation.
Observability.
OpenTelemetry traces, Datadog or Grafana for dashboards, Sentry for errors, Prometheus for metrics. Logs, metrics, and traces correlated by trace ID. Alerts that fire on actual user impact, not server noise.
FinOps.
Cost audit, right-sizing, storage-tier transitions, egress optimization. Tagged resources so cost attribution survives a CFO question. Kubecost for Kubernetes, native cost explorers elsewhere.
Security & compliance baseline.
IAM least-privilege, WAF rules, secrets management (AWS Secrets Manager or Cloudflare's equivalent), Zero Trust for internal tools. SOC 2 or HIPAA-ready posture when engagement requires it.
How We Work
Layer by layer, never a big bang.
Audit, migrate, harden, tune — sequenced so each step earns its keep before the next.
- Week 1
Audit and reference architecture.
Map your current infra, identify the 3–5 highest-impact changes (cost, performance, reliability). Output is a documented target architecture and sequenced delivery plan.
- Weeks 2–6
Migration in pieces.
Each layer in turn — edge first, then CI/CD, then observability, then origin tuning, then FinOps. No big-bang cutovers.
- Weeks 6–10
Hardening and handover.
Runbooks, on-call documentation, alerts tuned to real signal, IaC for everything that mattered. Your team owns the result.
- Ongoing
Quarterly tuning.
Optional retainer for cost reviews, architecture evolution, and FinOps reports as your traffic shape changes.
FAQ
Frequently asked questions.
What teams ask before scoping a cloud architecture or migration.
- Should I use Cloudflare or AWS?
- Both, layered. Cloudflare for the edge — CDN, Workers, R2, KV, D1, Durable Objects, Zero Trust. AWS (or GCP) for origin compute and stateful services that need to live in a specific region for compliance or data gravity. The 2026 modern stack is rarely 'pick one cloud' — it's 'use each one for what it's actually good at.' We architect for that explicitly.
- What's the difference between Cloudflare Workers and AWS Lambda?
- Workers run at Cloudflare's global edge with cold-starts measured in milliseconds, optimized for latency-sensitive request paths. Lambda runs in specific AWS regions, integrates deeply with the rest of AWS (S3, RDS, SQS), and is the right tool when the function needs to be close to the data. Worker for the request boundary; Lambda for backend computation that lives near its database.
- When does it make sense to use edge computing?
- When the work the function does is read-heavy, lightweight, and latency-sensitive — auth checks, rewrites, A/B routing, caching layers, personalization, the request middle. Edge is the wrong place for anything stateful that needs strong consistency with a database hundreds of milliseconds away. The pattern that works in 2026: edge for the request boundary, origin for the workload.
- How do I optimize my AWS bill?
- Four levers. One: right-sizing — most EC2 / RDS instances are oversized; we audit and recommend Graviton, autoscaling, and capacity tiers. Two: storage class transitions — S3 Standard to Intelligent-Tiering or Glacier where retrieval is rare. Three: data transfer — egress is the silent killer; move read paths to Cloudflare or CloudFront. Four: scheduled shutdowns for non-production workloads. A 20–40% reduction without service change is typical in our first FinOps engagement.
- What's a multi-cloud architecture?
- Using more than one cloud provider for different layers of the same product. The legitimate version (2026): Cloudflare at the edge, AWS or GCP for origin, Vercel for the app layer. The illegitimate version: running the same workload across two clouds for vendor independence — almost always more cost and complexity than it's worth. We architect the first, push back on the second unless there's a specific compliance reason.
- How do I set up CI/CD for a Next.js app?
- On Vercel: automatic — every PR gets a preview URL, main branch deploys to production, and rollbacks are one click. If you need to add gates (Lighthouse CI, Playwright E2E, security scans), they slot in as GitHub Actions before the Vercel deploy hook. If you're self-hosting Next.js on AWS or Cloudflare, we set up GitHub Actions to build, run tests, and deploy via the framework's CLI or Docker, with preview environments per PR.
- Cloudflare R2 vs AWS S3 — which should I use?
- R2 if egress matters (it's free), if your reads are global, and if you're already on Cloudflare for edge. S3 if you're deep in the AWS ecosystem and need integrations (Lambda triggers, Athena, Glue), or if regional consistency for a single region is the priority. For new product storage, R2 is increasingly the default; for existing AWS workloads, the migration math depends on your egress profile.
- What's the right autoscaling strategy?
- Two layers. Application autoscaling — Vercel and Cloudflare Workers scale automatically; on AWS we use Karpenter or auto-scaling groups with predictive policies, not just reactive. Database autoscaling — Aurora Serverless v2 or read replicas for most apps, manual sizing for predictable workloads. The wrong answer is the same answer everywhere; the right one depends on traffic shape, cold-start tolerance, and your cost ceiling.
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Tell us what you're running on. Same business day reply with a scoped next step.