Services
Independent Technology Consulting Services
I help organisations that run, or are about to run, a
multi-tenant platform on AWS and Kubernetes. The usual buyers
are platform leads in banks, government, pharma and regulated
scale-ups, and investors looking at those businesses.
Ongoing advisory work can emerge naturally from any of these
engagements where there is a continuing need for independent
technical judgement or for help with implementation.
01
Platform Architecture Review & Risk Assessment
What you will get
An independent assessment of whether your platform
architecture is capable of supporting the company's next
stage of growth — securely, reliably, and economically. If
relevant, a risk assessment for compliance with regulations in
your industry.
The engagement identifies material architectural and
operational risks, explains their business impact, and
provides a prioritised roadmap for addressing the issues that
matter most.
Typical situations include:
- A platform is becoming difficult to scale or operate.
-
Kubernetes or AWS architecture has grown organically and is
now complex.
-
Multi-tenancy, isolation, resilience or security concerns
are emerging.
-
The company is preparing for enterprise customers,
fundraising, acquisition or a major growth phase.
-
Leadership needs an independent view of technical risk
before making significant investment decisions.
Typical scope
The assessment is tailored to the platform, but may
include:
- AWS and cloud architecture
- Kubernetes architecture and platform design
- Multi-tenancy and tenant isolation
- Availability, resilience and disaster recovery
- Security architecture and trust boundaries
- Networking, identity and access
- Infrastructure and deployment architecture
- Observability and operational readiness
- Scalability and capacity
- Platform complexity and technical debt
- Cloud economics and architectural cost drivers
-
Engineering/platform operating model where relevant
- Governance, compliance and regulatory issues
Deliverables
- Executive-level assessment of the platform
- Architecture and risk findings
- Prioritised risk register
-
Identification of material architectural weaknesses and
dependencies
- Business impact and severity of key risks
- Recommended remediation priorities
-
Target-state or architectural recommendations where
appropriate
- Practical roadmap for the next phase
- Executive presentation / readout
2–4 weeks | from $10,000
The final scope and investment depend on platform
complexity, environments, tenancy model, regulatory
requirements and the depth of assessment required.
02
Observability & Alerting Uplift
What you will get
A practical assessment and improvement of observability and
alerting so that engineering teams can detect important
problems quickly, understand what is happening, and respond
without being overwhelmed by noise.
The engagement addresses the gap between
having monitoring and
having useful operational visibility.
However, we can also start from scratch if you don't have an
observability stack running already.
Typical situations include:
-
Alerts are noisy, poorly prioritised or routinely ignored.
-
Production incidents are discovered by customers before
engineers.
-
Teams struggle to understand failures across distributed
systems.
-
Dashboards exist but do not support effective incident
response.
-
Kubernetes/platform telemetry is inconsistent or incomplete.
-
Leadership wants greater confidence in reliability and
operational maturity.
Typical scope
Depending on the environment:
- Metrics, logs and traces
- Service and platform instrumentation
- Kubernetes and infrastructure observability
- Application and dependency visibility
- SLOs, SLIs and service health indicators
- Alerting strategy and alert quality
- Alert routing, severity and ownership
- Dashboards and operational views
- Incident detection and troubleshooting workflows
- Observability architecture and tooling
- Gaps, duplication and unnecessary telemetry
- Cost and operational overhead of observability
Deliverables
- Current-state observability assessment
- Observability and alerting gap analysis
- Prioritised recommendations
- Alert catalogue / alerting strategy
- Recommended SLIs/SLOs where appropriate
- Dashboard and operational-view recommendations
- Target-state observability architecture
- Prioritised implementation backlog
-
Selected high-value improvements implemented or
demonstrated, depending on engagement level
- Executive/engineering readout
3-10 weeks | from $20,000
The final scope and investment depend on system complexity,
number of services/environments, existing tooling and
whether implementation is included.
03
Technical Risk Assessment for VCs
What you will get
An independent technical assessment that helps investors
understand the technology risks behind a prospective
investment — and whether the platform and engineering
organisation can support the company's business plan.
The focus is not simply on finding technical debt. It is on
identifying
material risks that could affect valuation, growth,
scalability, resilience, security, regulatory readiness or
the investment thesis.
Typical situations include:
- Pre-investment technical due diligence
- Follow-on investment decisions
- Acquisition or strategic investment
-
A company is entering a new regulated or enterprise market
-
The investment thesis depends on rapid platform scaling
-
Investors need an independent technical perspective
alongside management's assessment
Typical scope
Tailored to the investment thesis and time available,
potentially including:
- System and platform architecture
- AWS/cloud infrastructure
- Kubernetes and platform engineering
- Multi-tenancy and isolation
- Scalability and resilience
- Security architecture
- Operational maturity and observability
- Technology debt and architectural constraints
-
Engineering organisation and key-person dependency
- Development and release practices
- Cloud economics and scalability of operating costs
- Regulatory/enterprise-readiness considerations
- Critical third-party dependencies
-
Technology roadmap and alignment with business plan
Deliverables
- Independent technical risk assessment
- Executive summary for the investment team
- Material risks and investment implications
- Risk register with severity/prioritisation
-
Assessment of scalability and architectural viability
- Key dependencies and potential failure points
- Assessment of engineering/platform maturity
- Areas requiring further investigation
- Recommended pre- or post-investment actions
- Investor briefing / Q&A session
1–3 weeks | from $12,000
The final investment depends on the complexity of the
target, available documentation/access, investment thesis,
time available and depth of diligence required.
