Technical advisory & architecture

The problem

Big technical decisions tend to happen under pressure. Someone's pushing for a cloud migration, the board wants an AI strategy, a vendor is pitching a platform that'll supposedly solve everything, or the architecture your team designed two years ago is starting to crack.

In those moments, it's hard to think clearly. You're too close to the problem, you don't have time to research every option, and the people selling you solutions have an obvious incentive.

What most companies need — and rarely get — is someone who's built these systems before, has no product to sell, and will tell you the truth even when the truth is "don't build this."

That's what we do.

What we do

Architecture reviews

You've got a system in production, or a design on paper, and you want to know if it'll hold up. We go through it — the infrastructure, the data flows, the failure modes, the parts nobody's thought about yet — and give you an honest assessment.

We're not looking for theoretical elegance. We're looking for the things that'll wake someone up at 3 AM in six months. Bottlenecks, single points of failure, security gaps, cost traps, and the places where your architecture assumes things that aren't actually true.

You get a written report with concrete findings and prioritized recommendations. Not a 60-slide deck with a maturity model nobody asked for.

Technology assessments

Build or buy? Kubernetes or managed platform? Open source or enterprise license? Self-hosted LLM or API? These decisions shape your trajectory for years, and most of the information available is written by someone selling one of the options.

We evaluate your options against your actual situation — your team size, your skills, your compliance requirements, your budget, your timeline. We've made enough of these decisions (and lived with the consequences) to know which trade-offs matter and which ones don't.

AI readiness audits

You know you want to do something with AI. You're not sure what's realistic, what's hype, and what your infrastructure can actually support.

We assess your data landscape, your existing systems, your team's capabilities, and your regulatory constraints. Then we tell you what's feasible, what's worth pursuing, and what you should wait on. No sugar-coating, no "everything is possible with AI" nonsense.

Migration planning

You're moving from on-prem to cloud, from one provider to another, from a monolith to services, or from legacy systems to something built in this decade. These transitions are where the most money gets wasted in IT — usually because someone underestimated the complexity or skipped the planning.

We design migration paths that are incremental, reversible where possible, and realistic about how long things actually take. We've seen enough "18-month migrations" that turned into 3-year nightmares to know what causes them.

How it works

Our advisory engagements are short and focused. Most run 2–4 weeks. Here's what that typically looks like:

Week 1: Listen

We talk to the people who matter — your engineers, your ops team, your product leads, sometimes your leadership. Not just the person who hired us. We look at code, infrastructure, documentation (if it exists), deployment pipelines, monitoring, and whatever else is relevant. We ask a lot of questions, some of them uncomfortable.

Week 2: Dig

We go deep on the areas where we see risk or opportunity. We test assumptions, benchmark alternatives, and build out scenarios. If we're reviewing an architecture, we stress-test it on paper. If we're evaluating options, we prototype where it helps.

Week 3–4: Deliver

You get a written deliverable — not a verbal download in a meeting that everyone remembers differently. Depending on the engagement, that's an architecture document, a decision matrix, a migration plan, or a prioritized roadmap. It includes what we found, what we recommend, and why. It also includes what we're not sure about, because pretending to have certainty where there isn't any doesn't help you.

We present it, walk through the reasoning, answer questions, and make sure your team has what they need to act on it — whether that's with us or without us.

What you actually get

Let's be specific, because "advisory" can mean anything:

Architecture review → A written report covering: current state assessment, identified risks and bottlenecks, scalability analysis, security observations, cost optimization opportunities, and prioritized recommendations with effort estimates.

Technology assessment → A decision document covering: options evaluated, evaluation criteria (weighted to your context), trade-off analysis, total cost of ownership comparison, team capability fit, and a clear recommendation with reasoning.

AI readiness audit → A readiness report covering: data landscape inventory, infrastructure assessment, team skills gap analysis, regulatory constraints mapped to use cases, prioritized opportunity list, and a realistic timeline for the first deliverable.

Migration plan → A migration document covering: current and target architecture, migration strategy (big bang vs. incremental — almost always incremental), risk register, rollback plan, dependency map, resource requirements, and phased timeline.

Every deliverable is written in plain language. Technical enough to be useful for your engineering team, clear enough for your leadership to make decisions on.

What makes this different from every other consultancy

We build things. Most of our work is implementation — AI systems, cloud infrastructure, custom software. That means our advice comes from people who've recently deployed the things they're recommending. Not from someone who read a Gartner report.

We're vendor-neutral. We don't resell cloud services, we don't have partnership tiers to maintain, and we don't get kickbacks for recommending specific tools. If the best answer for you is AWS, we'll say AWS. If it's a €50/month Hetzner box, we'll say that too.

We tell you when not to build. If your problem is better solved with an off-the-shelf tool, a spreadsheet, or just hiring one more person, we'll say so. We'd rather lose a project than watch you spend six months building something you didn't need.

Short engagements, not open-ended retainers. We scope tightly, deliver in weeks, and get out of your way. If you want us to stick around and help implement, great. If not, you have everything you need to move forward on your own.

Who this is for

This tends to be most valuable when:

• You're about to make a significant technology investment and want confidence in the direction
• You inherited a system or architecture from a previous team or vendor and need to understand what you're working with
• You've been told you need AI, Kubernetes, a migration, or a replatform — and you want someone to sanity-check that before you commit budget
• Your engineering team is strong but small, and they don't have time to research every option while also shipping features
• You got burned before and want a second pair of eyes this time

It's probably not the right fit if:

• You've already decided what to build and just need hands to build it — that's our software development or platform engineering offering
• You need ongoing strategic advice over months — we're better in short, focused bursts than as a permanent fixture in your meetings