Cloud Native Development — Microservices, Kubernetes, Kafka & Serverless
Expert cloud native development services — microservices architecture and development, Kubernetes containerisation and orchestration, Apache Kafka event streaming, serverless application development, Istio service mesh, GitOps with ArgoCD, cloud native security, full-stack observability, and dedicated cloud native engineering teams for businesses worldwide.
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Cloud Native Services We Deliver
From cloud native architecture design and microservices development through Kubernetes containerisation, Apache Kafka event streaming, serverless, Istio service mesh, GitOps CI/CD, full-stack observability, cloud native security, and legacy modernisation.
Cloud Native Architecture Design & Review
Cloud native architecture design for greenfield applications and re-architecture of existing monoliths — service decomposition strategy, data store per service pattern, event-driven vs synchronous communication design, Kubernetes workload design (Deployments, StatefulSets, Jobs, CronJobs), resilience patterns (circuit breakers, retries, bulkheads), and ADR (Architecture Decision Records) for all major design choices.
Microservices Development
Microservices design and development — service decomposition using Domain-Driven Design (DDD) bounded contexts, RESTful and gRPC service APIs, synchronous inter-service communication with timeouts and retries, shared libraries without tight coupling, containerised deployment, independent CI/CD pipelines per service, distributed tracing (Jaeger/Zipkin), and log correlation across service boundaries.
Kubernetes Containerisation & Orchestration
End-to-end Kubernetes workload design and deployment — Dockerfiles (multi-stage builds, distroless base images), Helm chart development, Kubernetes Deployments and StatefulSets, ConfigMaps and Secrets management (with Vault Agent Injector), HPA and VPA autoscaling, KEDA event-driven autoscaling, PodDisruptionBudgets, resource requests and limits, and liveness/readiness/startup probes.
Serverless Application Development
Serverless architecture design and implementation — AWS Lambda, Azure Functions, and Google Cloud Functions for event-driven workloads, Step Functions and Durable Functions for serverless orchestration, API Gateway integration, SQS/SNS/EventBridge event sources, cold start optimisation, Lambda Layers for shared dependencies, function sizing and timeout optimisation, and local development with SAM CLI or Azure Functions Core Tools.
Event-Driven Architecture & Apache Kafka
Event-driven system design and implementation — Apache Kafka topic design and partition strategy, Kafka Streams for real-time stream processing, Kafka Connect for source and sink connectors, AWS SNS/SQS/EventBridge event routing, Azure Service Bus and Event Hubs, event sourcing and CQRS patterns, schema registry for event contracts (Confluent Schema Registry or AWS Glue), and dead letter queue handling.
Service Mesh (Istio & Linkerd)
Service mesh implementation for mature microservices environments — Istio installation and configuration (sidecar injection, mTLS mesh-wide encryption, Envoy proxy configuration), Linkerd as a lightweight alternative, traffic management (VirtualService, DestinationRule for canary and blue-green), circuit breaking, fault injection for chaos testing, Kiali visualisation, and service mesh observability integration with Prometheus and Grafana.
Cloud Native Tools & Technologies
Kubernetes (EKS/AKS/GKE), Helm, Istio, Linkerd, AWS Lambda, Azure Functions, Apache Kafka, Kafka Streams, Prometheus, Grafana, Jaeger, OpenTelemetry, ArgoCD, Flagger, OPA/Gatekeeper, Falco, HashiCorp Vault, Go, Node.js, Python, Java, and the full CNCF ecosystem.
Cloud Native Engagement Models
Hire a dedicated cloud native team, engage on a fixed-scope cloud native project, or get strategic cloud native architecture advisory and technical leadership for your engineering team.
- SaaS products being re-architected from monolith to microservices
- Greenfield cloud native platforms being built from scratch
- Engineering teams that need cloud native expertise they do not have internally
- Series A/B startups building for scale from the beginning
Team available within 5–7 business days
- Containerising and Kubernetes-deploying an existing application
- Building a specific microservice or serverless component
- Implementing an Apache Kafka event streaming pipeline
- Cloud native security hardening (Kubernetes RBAC, OPA, Vault)
Typical 4–16 week engagements
- CTOs planning a cloud native modernisation programme
- Engineering teams lacking cloud native architecture experience
- Independent review of existing cloud native architecture
- Kubernetes platform design and internal developer platform planning
Monthly retainer or fixed-term engagement
Our Cloud Native Delivery Process
From cloud native readiness assessment and architecture design through Kubernetes platform setup, microservice development, event-driven integration, GitOps CI/CD, and observability and production readiness.
We begin with an architectural assessment of your current application — monolith or existing services, data model, dependencies, traffic patterns, team structure, and operational maturity. We produce a cloud native architecture proposal covering: service decomposition map (bounded contexts), data store strategy (database per service), communication patterns (synchronous REST/gRPC vs event-driven), Kubernetes workload design, observability strategy, and a phased delivery roadmap. All decisions are documented in Architecture Decision Records.
Before application microservices are developed, we establish the Kubernetes platform — cluster provisioning on EKS/AKS/GKE (or on-premises), cluster hardening (RBAC, Pod Security Standards, NetworkPolicies, OPA/Gatekeeper), Helm chart library, ArgoCD GitOps setup, Prometheus+Grafana observability stack, Loki log aggregation, service mesh (if warranted), and developer tooling (local Kubernetes with Minikube or Kind, Skaffold for inner loop development).
Each microservice is developed API-first (OpenAPI specification or protobuf for gRPC) before implementation. We implement the service in Go, Node.js, Python, Java, or .NET depending on your team preferences and use case, write unit and integration tests, containerise with a multi-stage Dockerfile, write a Helm chart, configure health check endpoints, add distributed tracing with OpenTelemetry, and implement structured logging (JSON to stdout — consumed by Loki or ELK).
For event-driven components, we design the event contract (Avro or JSON schema registered in Schema Registry), implement Kafka producers and consumers (Kafka Streams for stateful processing, or Kafka Connect for source/sink connectors), configure topic partitioning and retention, implement consumer group management, dead letter queue handling, and idempotency at the consumer level. AWS SNS/SQS or Azure Service Bus for simpler event routing needs.
Full CI/CD pipeline per microservice — GitHub Actions or GitLab CI with Trivy container scanning, Snyk SCA, unit test gate, Docker build and push to ECR/ACR, Helm chart deployment to dev via ArgoCD, integration test suite against dev, and promotion to staging and production via GitOps pull request. Flagger for canary deployments with automatic rollback if Prometheus SLOs are breached. Zero-downtime deployments on every merge.
Production readiness review before each service goes live — SLI and SLO definition (latency p99, error rate, availability targets), Prometheus alert rules on SLO burn rate, Grafana dashboards per service and business domain, distributed traces configured end-to-end, PagerDuty alert routing, runbook for each alert, production readiness checklist (health checks, graceful shutdown, zero-downtime deployment tested, load test at 2x expected peak traffic), and DR failover test.
What Our Cloud Native Clients Say
Engineering teams across the US, UK, and Australia trust 1Solutions to design and build cloud native platforms that scale — from Kafka-based data pipelines through Kubernetes microservices architectures and Strangler Fig monolith decomposition programmes.
1Solutions designed and built our cloud native platform from scratch — microservices on Kubernetes EKS, Kafka for event streaming between services, ArgoCD for GitOps deployment, and Istio for mTLS between services. Six months after launch we scaled from 50K to 2M daily active users with zero architecture changes. The platform they built scaled horizontally exactly as designed. We could not have done this with our internal team alone.
We had a 8-year-old Python monolith that was hitting performance limits and blocking our team velocity — 4 backend engineers could not ship independently because everything was coupled. 1Solutions designed a Strangler Fig decomposition strategy, built the first 3 microservices (auth, notifications, billing) in 6 months, and established the Kubernetes platform and CI/CD tooling. Our deployment frequency went from once a fortnight to 30+ times per day.
1Solutions built our real-time data pipeline on Apache Kafka — ingesting events from 12 source systems, processing them with Kafka Streams, and materialising views for our analytics dashboard. Processing 4 million events per hour with under 200ms end-to-end latency. The Kafka architecture they designed is rock solid. In 18 months of production, we have not had a single data loss incident.
Why Choose 1Solutions for Cloud Native Development
15+ years of distributed systems experience, deep CNCF ecosystem expertise, honest microservices advice, Kafka depth, security designed in, GitOps from the start, observable by design, and Kubernetes expertise at both platform and application layer.
15+ Years Distributed Systems Experience
We have been designing and building distributed systems since before Kubernetes existed — from message-queue-based SOA architectures through container-based microservices to modern cloud native platforms. We have learned the failure modes of distributed systems the hard way and design cloud native architectures that are genuinely resilient, not just architecturally correct on paper.
CNCF Ecosystem Specialists
We work deeply in the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) ecosystem — Kubernetes, Prometheus, Grafana, Jaeger, Envoy, ArgoCD, Flagger, OPA, Falco, Helm, and more. We track CNCF project maturity and only recommend production-ready projects for production workloads. We don't chase shiny new CNCF projects — we build on proven foundations.
Microservices When They Make Sense, Monolith When They Do Not
We do not sell microservices as the answer to every problem. A well-structured modular monolith deployed on Kubernetes is often the right starting point for early-stage products. We recommend microservices decomposition when team scaling, independent deployment, or compliance isolation genuinely justify the additional complexity — and we say so clearly when they do not.
Event-Driven Architecture Depth
Kafka is not a simple queue — it requires careful topic partitioning strategy, consumer group design, schema management, and idempotency handling to work correctly at scale. We have designed and operated Kafka clusters processing hundreds of millions of events per day, and we bring that depth of experience to your event-driven architecture design.
Security Designed In, Not Added On
Cloud native security is an architectural decision, not a feature added after launch. We implement zero-trust networking (mTLS with Istio), Kubernetes RBAC and Pod Security Standards, OPA/Gatekeeper admission control, runtime security with Falco, and image signing with Cosign from day one. Security posture is reviewed at each milestone, not at the end of the project.
GitOps From the Start
GitOps (ArgoCD/Flux) is not an afterthought — it is how we deploy everything. Git is the single source of truth for all Kubernetes workload state from the first sprint. No kubectl apply from a laptop in production, ever. Every deployment is a pull request, reviewed, merged, and automatically applied. Rollback is a git revert. Drift is detected and corrected automatically.
Observable by Design
Observability is not added to cloud native applications after they go live — it is a first-class engineering concern from service design. Every service we build emits structured logs (JSON to stdout), exposes Prometheus metrics via /metrics, and instruments distributed traces with OpenTelemetry. SLIs and SLOs are defined before go-live, not after the first incident.
Kubernetes Experts — Platform and Application Layer
We know Kubernetes at both the platform level (cluster provisioning, hardening, networking, storage, autoscaling, multi-tenancy) and the application level (workload design, health probes, rolling deployments, PodDisruptionBudgets, resource management). When your Kubernetes cluster or workload has a problem in production, we diagnose and fix it — not escalate to a generic cloud support ticket.
Build Your Cloud Native Platform
Tell us about your application and cloud native goals, and we will schedule a free architecture discovery call. Whether you are building a new cloud native platform from scratch, decomposing a monolith to microservices, implementing Kafka event streaming, containerising on Kubernetes, or need cloud native security hardening — our engineers will design your architecture and provide a transparent quote within 24 hours.
Free cloud native architecture discovery call with a senior distributed systems engineer
Honest microservices advice — we recommend a monolith when it is the right answer
Full CNCF ecosystem coverage: Kubernetes, Kafka, Istio, ArgoCD, Prometheus, OPA, Falco
GitOps from sprint one, observability designed in, security from day one
Response within 24 business hours from our cloud native engineering team
Tell Us About Your Cloud Native Project
Cloud Native — Frequently Asked Questions
Common questions about cloud native development — what cloud native means, microservices vs monolith, serverless, service mesh, event-driven architecture, security, and timelines.