Infrastructure Modernization Sprints
A short, focused engagement that fixes the infrastructure problems actually costing you something, without committing to a project that runs for months.
What a sprint is for
Most infrastructure problems are not interesting. They are a backup job that has been failing silently since a credential rotated, a monitoring dashboard nobody has opened in a year, a staging environment from a project that ended in 2022 and still costs money every month.
None of these justify a large project. All of them are quietly expensive, and they accumulate. A modernization sprint exists to clear that backlog in a defined amount of time, without the overhead of a proposal cycle, a steering committee, and a six-month plan.
The format is deliberately small. You know roughly what it costs before it starts, you get a written record of what changed, and you are not committed to anything after it ends.
What usually turns up
The findings are more predictable than clients expect. In most environments we look at, some version of the following is present.
Backups that have never been restored. They run, they report success, and nobody has confirmed the resulting file can actually rebuild the system. This is the single most common serious finding.
Alerting that is either absent or ignored. Either there is no alerting on the things that break, or there is so much of it that the team filters it out. Both fail in the same way at the same moment.
Resources nobody owns. Instances running for a service that was decommissioned, storage volumes detached from anything, environments duplicated during a project and never cleaned up.
Access that outlived its purpose. Credentials belonging to former employees, API keys with far broader permissions than the integration needs, and shared accounts nobody wants to rotate because it is unclear what would break.
Runtimes past their support window. An operating system or language version no longer receiving security patches, usually left alone because upgrading it is scary and there is no test coverage.
Order matters more than volume
The temptation in a short engagement is to fix as many things as possible. That is the wrong optimisation.
We work in order of consequence, which means the boring reliability items come before the visible improvements. Getting a tested restore in place is less satisfying than cutting the monthly bill, but if the sprint is cut short, the restore is the one you needed. Cost optimisation is genuinely valuable, and it is also the item that can wait a month without anyone getting hurt.
This ordering occasionally disappoints people who wanted the savings number first. We would rather have that conversation at the start than after an incident.
What a sprint will not fix
It is worth being clear about the limits of the format, because a short engagement gets oversold easily.
A sprint does not re-architect your system. If the underlying design is the problem (a single database everything contends on, a monolith that cannot be deployed without coordinating four teams), a few weeks of infrastructure work will make it more stable and cheaper to run, but it will still be the same design afterwards. That is a different piece of work with a different shape.
A sprint also does not replace ongoing ownership. We can put monitoring in place, but someone has to respond when it fires. We can get backups verified, but the verification needs repeating. Where there is no one to hand that to, the sensible conversation is about maintenance rather than a one-off engagement.
What you have at the end
The concrete output is the changes themselves, but the artefact that tends to matter longest is the documentation.
Very few teams have an accurate written description of their own infrastructure. It exists in the heads of one or two people and in configuration that has drifted from whatever was originally intended. Producing that description is a large part of the sprint's value, because it is what makes the next decision (migrate, optimise, or leave alone) something you can reason about rather than guess at.
You also get an honest list of what we did not fix. That list is the natural starting point if you decide to do more.
What you get
A findings list ordered by consequence
Everything we find, ranked by what it would cost you if it went wrong tomorrow. No missing backup and no expired certificate ends up buried on page four.
Backups that have been restored
A backup nobody has tested is a hope, not a safeguard. We verify recovery by actually restoring one, and we record how long it took.
Monitoring and alerting
Metrics, logs and alerts on the things that matter, tuned so that an alert means something. Constant noise trains people to ignore the one that counts.
Security fixes applied
Open ports, stale credentials, unpatched runtimes, permissions granted years ago to someone who has left. The unglamorous list that most incidents come from.
Cost reductions with the numbers attached
Oversized instances, forgotten environments, unattached storage volumes still billing monthly. We report what changed and what it saves.
Documentation of the current state
A written account of how the infrastructure is actually set up, which is often the single most useful artefact a sprint produces.
How we work
- 01
Access and audit
We get read access to the environment and spend the first days understanding what is there, including the parts that are not in anyone's diagram.
- 02
Agree the scope together
We bring you the findings list and you decide what goes into the sprint. Some things are urgent, some are cosmetic, and you should be the one drawing that line.
- 03
Fix, in order of risk
Work runs in priority order, so if the sprint ends early the important items are already done. Backups and monitoring usually come before optimisation.
- 04
Verify under real conditions
Changes are tested against actual load and actual failure scenarios rather than assumed to work. A restore is performed, not just configured.
- 05
Hand over with a plan for what's next
You get the documentation, the change log, and an honest list of what we did not get to and how urgent it is.
Tools and technology
Where a solid open-source tool exists, we choose it over a closed one. No lock-in to a single vendor, and costs you can actually predict.
- OpenTofu
- Terraform
- Docker
- Kubernetes
- PostgreSQL
- pgBackRest
- Wazuh
- Grafana
- Prometheus
- AWS
- Microsoft Azure
- Google Cloud
Frequently asked questions
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