Kuala Lumpur · serving Malaysia & Thailand
Cloud Architecture Consulting
Aqvantiq is a multi-cloud AI system integrator in Kuala Lumpur that designs cloud architecture for organizations in Malaysia and Thailand. We produce the blueprint — landing zone, network and identity model, data and backup design, cost model — and hand over the Terraform that builds it, across AWS, Google Cloud, Huawei Cloud, Azure and DigitalOcean.
How an architecture engagement runs
Four steps, a decision point after each — and you can stop after any step and keep everything produced so far.
- 1
Discovery
Accounts, workloads, dependencies, current spend, and the recovery objectives nobody wrote down.
- 2
Design
Landing zone, network, identity, data and backup design, cost model, and the trade-offs we rejected.
- 3
Build
Terraform modules, state backend, pipeline, environments verified against the design.
- 4
Handover or operate
Runbooks and a working session for your team — or we keep running it.
Design is led by Anson Lau, the founder — ex-Silverlake Axis cloud DevOps engineer, 5+ years hands-on across multiple clouds — and delivered by the same group of engineers. The engineer who scopes the architecture stays accountable for the Terraform, and stays on if you want managed cloud services.
What cloud architecture consulting produces
A design your team can build from and audit against: a landing-zone blueprint, network and identity model, environment separation, data and backup design, a cost model, and the Terraform that creates it. Nothing is slide-only — every diagram has matching infrastructure as code, so the drawing and the running environment cannot quietly drift apart.
Landing zone blueprint
Account topology, environment separation, guardrails, and the naming and tagging standard everything depends on.
Network and connectivity design
VPC layout, routing, private endpoints, controlled egress, and how offices and data centres connect in.
Identity and access model
Federated identity, least-privilege roles, break-glass procedure, workload identity for pipelines. No long-lived keys.
Data, backup and recovery design
Where each dataset lives, how it is encrypted, who holds the keys, and a restore that has been run.
Cost model
What it costs per environment, which lines scale with traffic, and the levers available before it hurts.
Terraform modules
The code that builds the design, in your repository, with a state backend and a pipeline that applies it.
Written against constraints you can check: load, recovery objectives, data classification, budget ceiling, and the skills your team actually has. If the honest answer is three virtual machines and a managed database, that is what the document says.
Designing for multiple clouds without doubling the cost
The expensive part of multi-cloud is not the infrastructure — it is running two of everything else: two pipelines, two Terraform codebases, two monitoring stacks, two ways to log in. We keep exactly one of each and point it at every cloud you use. Each workload then runs whole on whichever platform suits it, so you get the pricing and services of two clouds while operating one toolchain, not two.
Keep each workload whole
An application and its database live on the same cloud. Splitting one system across two providers buys you latency and a data-transfer bill — so we place whole workloads, never halves.
Use each cloud's best, safely
We use each platform's strongest managed services rather than only the features every cloud shares — wrapped behind a small interface in your code, so swapping one out later can be a contained integration change rather than a rewrite.
One login, one pipeline
Your engineers sign in once, through one identity system connected to every platform, and one pipeline deploys to all of them — no long-lived keys, and one place to add an approval or a rollback.
Malaysian and Thai enterprises routinely end up with AWS for one line of business, Google Cloud for analytics, and Huawei Cloud where a public-sector requirement points there. That mix is a fact to design for, not a strategy to argue with.
Cutting cloud spend in Malaysia without breaking the workload
In order: make spend visible, remove waste, then change the architecture. Most bills fall without touching the design — untagged resources, oversized instances, non-production running at 3am, snapshots kept forever. Only after that do commitments and placement decisions make sense, because you finally have a baseline worth committing to.
That sequencing matters locally. Alphaus, writing on FinOps in Malaysia on 20 June 2025, characterises most Malaysian financial institutions as sitting at the early to developing stages of FinOps maturity — basic cost visibility and manual reporting rather than automated optimization and full chargeback. Selling a mature operating model to an organization that cannot yet answer "which team owns this line" is how these programs stall.
Full guide: cloud cost optimization and FinOps for Malaysian enterprises — the six levers in the order we work them, what blocks each one, and the
ap-southeast-5 placement question. The
AWS side of it is on our AWS page.
Choosing between serverless, containers and virtual machines
Match the pattern to the traffic shape and to the team that will operate it. Serverless wins on bursty, low-baseline work. Kubernetes earns its overhead once you run several services with steady traffic. Virtual machines stay correct for licensed software and anything mid-migration. Most real estates use two of the three.
| Pattern | Fits when | Cost profile | Watch out for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Serverless (functions, managed queues and API layer) | Bursty or event-driven work, internal tools, glue between systems | Near zero at rest, steep at sustained throughput | Cold starts, execution limits, per-invocation cost once traffic is constant |
| Containers on Kubernetes | Several services, steady traffic, teams already building images | Predictable, but the cluster is a fixed floor | Paying for a cluster to run three services; upgrade cadence |
| Managed containers, no cluster | Stateless services needing more than a function, less than Kubernetes | Between the two, and easy to model | Feature ceilings once traffic routing gets complicated |
| Virtual machines | Licensed or appliance software, anything mid-migration | Highest per unit of work, fully predictable | Treating the VM as permanent and never revisiting it |
The choice is downstream of the application: if the code assumes a shared filesystem and a nightly batch window, containerizing it changes the deployment story and nothing else. That is a modernization conversation.
How the architecture meets Malaysian security and compliance
By building the controls your risk and legal teams have to evidence, and by writing down where each dataset lives. Malaysian obligations arrive from four directions at once — the Cyber Security Act 2024, Bank Negara's technology risk policy, the Personal Data Protection Act, and the National Cloud Computing Policy. The design has to answer all of them in one topology.
-
Cyber Security Act 2024 [Act 854]
In force 26 August 2024. Duties for National Critical Information Infrastructure entities, plus licensing of cyber security service providers.
NACSA -
Bank Negara Malaysia RMiT
For licensed financial institutions. Drives cloud risk assessment, exit planning, concentration risk and recovery without the provider.
BNM, issued 28 November 2025 -
Personal Data Protection Act 2010
Decides which stores hold personal data, who can reach them, how they are encrypted, and how deletion is proven.
What the 2024 amendments changed -
National Cloud Computing Policy
Launched 13 August 2025 on five pillars, including secure data protection and privacy. Read it before committing a public-sector-facing workload.
Ministry of Digital
We are engineers, not your compliance advisers: we build and evidence the controls, and your risk, legal and audit functions decide whether they are sufficient. Full guide: what Malaysian cloud compliance actually requires of an architecture.
Frequently asked questions
Can't find your answer?
Ask it directly and an engineer answers, usually the same working day.
Ask an engineer What does cloud architecture consulting actually produce?
A design your team can build from and audit against: a landing-zone blueprint, network and identity model, environment separation, data and backup design, a cost model, and the Terraform that creates it. Nothing is slide-only — every diagram has matching infrastructure as code, so the drawing and the running environment cannot quietly drift apart.
Do you design for one cloud or several?
Either. Aqvantiq works across AWS, Google Cloud, Huawei Cloud, Azure and DigitalOcean, so the design starts with your workload rather than a vendor we are tied to. Plenty of good answers are single-cloud. Where a second platform is genuinely warranted, we keep the control plane uniform with Terraform, Kubernetes and one CI/CD system so you are not operating two of everything.
Can you review an architecture we already have?
Yes. A review is often the better first engagement: we read the accounts, the Terraform and the runbooks, then come back with what is load-bearing, what is risk, what is waste, and the order we would fix them in. You get the findings and the remediation plan whether or not you continue with us.
Do you hand over the Terraform?
Yes. The Infrastructure as Code lives in your repository, under your account, with a state backend you control. That is the point — an architecture that only exists in a slide deck drifts from reality within a quarter. DevOps as a Service covers the pipeline that applies it.
How does cloud cost optimization work in Malaysia specifically?
The mechanics are universal — allocation, rightsizing, storage tiering, commitments — but placement is a local lever. AWS opened its Asia Pacific (Malaysia) Region, ap-southeast-5, in August 2024, and EC2 there runs roughly 13% below the Singapore region for the same instance types (usage.ai, updated 29 July 2026). Whether you can use it depends on residency and latency, not price alone.
Which Malaysian regulations shape a cloud architecture?
Four, and they arrive from different directions: the Cyber Security Act 2024 for entities designated as National Critical Information Infrastructure, Bank Negara Malaysia's RMiT policy document for licensed financial institutions, the Personal Data Protection Act 2010 as amended, and the National Cloud Computing Policy for national direction. The design has to answer all of them in one topology — our Malaysian cloud compliance guide works through each.
What security controls do you build in by default?
Account separation per environment; federated identity with least-privilege roles and no long-lived keys; encryption at rest and in transit with the key-custody question answered explicitly; private networking with controlled egress; centralized logs with a stated retention period; backups with a restore that has been executed; and every infrastructure change through a merge request, so the audit trail is the git history.
Do you work with organizations in Thailand?
Yes. Aqvantiq delivers across Kuala Lumpur and Bangkok, and the same architecture practice serves Thai enterprises. See cloud consulting in Thailand for how the cross-border engagements are run.
Related services
Working across the border? Cloud consulting in Thailand covers the same practice for Thai enterprises.
A second opinion on your architecture
Send us the shape of the problem — current platform, workloads, what is hurting. You will get a direct answer from the engineer who would do the work, not a discovery call script.
Contact Aqvantiq