Software Architecture Consulting for Scalable, Secure Systems
A short, focused engagement on a specific question: will this design hold, where will it break first, and what should we do about it. Delivered as a document with findings ranked by cost and consequence.
Discuss your projectWhat we do
Design review before you build
A proposed architecture assessed against the load, the team, and the failure modes it will actually meet. The cheapest review available, because nothing has been built yet.
Scalability assessment
Where the system breaks as volume grows, and in what order. Usually the database long before the application servers, and usually one specific query rather than the system as a whole.
Security review
Authentication and session handling, access control enforcement, data at rest and in transit, secret management, dependency exposure, and the injection and object-reference classes of bug. Not a penetration test — a design review, which finds different and often more consequential problems.
Performance diagnosis
A specific complaint traced to a specific cause, with measurement rather than inference. "The application is slow" almost always resolves to a handful of queries or one missing index.
Technology selection
A decision between options, assessed against your team's existing skills and your operational capacity rather than against benchmarks. The best technology your team cannot run is the wrong technology.
Second opinion
On a recommendation you have received, particularly one that involves a rewrite or a migration. Those are expensive enough to be worth checking independently.
When to call us
The point is to arrive before the decision is irreversible rather than after.
- You are about to start a significant build and want the design checked while changing it is still cheap.
- The application is slowing down as you grow and nobody can say precisely why.
- A rewrite or replatform has been proposed and you want to know whether it is necessary or merely appealing.
- You are approaching a compliance review and need to know whether the architecture will survive it.
- A due diligence process is coming and the technical questions need answers you can defend.
- Your team disagrees internally and an outside assessment would settle it on the merits.
- An incident exposed a weakness and you want to know what else shares that weakness.
What the deliverable looks like
A written document, not a slide deck. It states what we looked at and what we did not, so the limits of the review are explicit. Findings are ranked, each with the consequence if ignored, the rough cost to address, and whether it needs doing now or can wait — ranking is what makes a review actionable, and an unranked list of thirty observations gets filed.
Where we recommend a change, we say what we would do and why, including the trade-off it carries. Where we think the current design is fine, we say that too. A review that finds nothing of substance is a legitimate outcome and we will not manufacture findings to justify the fee.
We also note what we would want to measure before acting on anything performance-related, because architecture advice given without measurement is guesswork dressed up as expertise.
Common questions
Tell us what you need
Describe the problem and we will come back with scope, timeline, and a rate. No obligation to proceed.
Get in touch