Managed Services

Critical Technics Premium

Everything in Professional, plus a named architect for migrations, modernization, and the decisions that need judgment.

Includes everything in Essential and Professional, plus the additions below.
Best for
Organizations taking on migrations, modernization, or authorization work who need senior engineering without hiring for it.

Senior Engineering Without the Hire

Whether to move a monolith to containers, how to structure an environment for an authorization, whether a workload belongs on Lambda at all: these need someone who knows AWS and knows your situation. They do not fit a ticket queue, so they get deferred until they are urgent.

Premium puts a named architect on your team for exactly this work. One person who has carried your environment’s context long enough to give you a considered answer.

Judgment You Can Reach

The scarce thing is rarely execution capacity. It is someone who has done this before telling you which of three plausible options is right for you.

Senior Judgment on Tap

A cloud architect who already understands your environment, available for the decisions that shape the next few years. Hiring one outright is a six-figure commitment and a long search, and most organizations need the judgment more often than the full-time seat.

Projects Without a New Vendor

Migrations, modernization, and environment restructuring handled by the team that already runs your accounts. No procurement cycle, and no ramp-up period before the work starts producing.

Decisions Made Once

Architectural choices documented with the reasoning attached, so the next person to touch them understands why. Written rationale means later work builds on the decision instead of rediscovering it.

Continuity of Context

The same people maintain your accounts, watch your workloads, and design your changes, so context carries straight from operations into design.

What Premium Adds

Everything in Essential and Professional, plus engineering capacity for work that does not fit an operational cadence.

Named Cloud Architect

A specific person assigned to your account, carrying its history, available on an agreed basis for design work, decision support, and the questions that call for judgment.

Architecture Advisory

Design review of proposed changes before they get built, and a partner for the decisions behind them. The recurring Well-Architected assessment ships from Essential up; this is the architect who works the findings with you and designs what replaces them.

Migration & Modernization Engineering

Hands-on delivery for the projects that come out of advisory work: workload migrations, containerization, serverless adoption, multi-account restructuring. Executed by the team that will then operate the result.

Advanced Engineering Support

Escalation into deep expertise for problems that stop being operational and start being architectural. Performance work, cost re-engineering, and the novel problems that have no documented answer.

How It Works

Named assignment

Your architect is identified by name at the start, with agreed availability and named backup coverage.

Advisory before delivery

Design and decision work comes first, so project scope is well informed before delivery starts.

Continuous handover

Decisions and their reasoning are documented as they are made, in your repository, so your team can carry the work forward independently.

Frequently Asked Questions

How much of the architect’s time do we get?

An agreed allocation, set at onboarding against what your roadmap requires. A team taking on a migration needs substantially more than a steady-state team, so we size it after understanding what you are planning.

Is it the same person every time?

Yes, and that is the point. Most of the value is context, not credentials, so a named architect who carries your environment’s history is worth more than a rotating pool. We name backup coverage too, so a vacation is not a service gap.

Does this replace hiring a cloud architect?

For many organizations, yes, at least for a while. If your AWS estate grows to where you need that judgment daily instead of weekly, hiring becomes better economics and we will tell you when we think you have crossed that line.

Can we use Premium for a specific project?

The tier is ongoing, but stepping up to Premium for the duration of a migration or authorization push and stepping back down afterward is a normal pattern, and the tiers are built to allow it.

Do we have to buy the lower tiers separately?

No. Premium includes everything in Essential and Professional. The tiers are cumulative.

What kinds of projects does this cover?

Workload migrations, containerization and serverless adoption, multi-account restructuring, cost re-engineering, and environment design for an authorization or validation effort. Very large programs may warrant separate scoping, and we will flag that early so the retainer stays right-sized.

How does this work for regulated environments?

Your architect works against your control set from the start, because compliance mapping is included from the entry tier up. Design choices are checked against your controls as they are made, well ahead of assessment.

Related work

Book a Free Architecture Review

Tell us what is on your roadmap for the next year and we will tell you whether you need an architect on retainer, a project, or a hire.

Book Your Review