Observe
weeks 01—08Ride-alongs with on-call. Weekly synthesis memos. No advice, no roadmaps. We are learning the room.
Boutique infrastructure consultancy — est. 2018
Infrastructure at the limit of attention.
We take seven engagements a year. Not because the work is rare, but because the listening is. Each engagement begins with eight weeks of pure observation — before any architecture is drawn, before any vendor is named, before any roadmap is published.
Engagements / year
07
Median observation phase
56d
Practitioner ratio
1 : 1
limit · observe · build
scroll
01 / Manifest
Why we limit ourselves.
-
01
Listening before architecture.
The first eight weeks are spent in your operations. We sit in your incident channels. We read three years of postmortems. We do not draw anything.
-
02
One client at a time, per practitioner.
A practitioner is never split. No context switching, no dashboards of unrelated tickets. The relationship is one to one because attention is one to one.
-
03
Vendor neutrality, paid for.
We accept no vendor commissions, no referral fees, no hidden margins. Our retainer pays for our independence. The contract is explicit.
-
04
Documents that survive us.
Every engagement leaves a runbook your team can edit. We assume we will be replaced — the deliverable is your team’s autonomy, not ours.
-
05
Refusal as a service.
When the right answer is “do not migrate,” we say so. When the right answer is “keep the monolith,” we say so. The bill is the same.
02 / Practice
The shape of the work.
Diagnose
weeks 09—14One written diagnosis. Forty pages, no slides. Read aloud at a single all-hands. Questions answered for as long as questions exist.
Build
weeks 15—36Pair-programming with your engineers. Every commit co-authored. Every architectural decision recorded with a counter-argument.
Leave
weeks 37—40A graceful handover. Two-year free office hours. A standing offer to refuse a re-engagement if your team has grown into it.
03 / Engagements
A partial ledger.
Names redacted. Outcomes recorded. The list is short on purpose.
Year
Sector
Brief
Outcome
2024
Public broadcaster
Decommission a 14-year transcoding pipeline without on-air interruption.
Decommissioned. 0 minutes off-air. Replaced with a 1,200-line successor.
2023
Industrial logistics
Adjudicate between a public-cloud lift and a colocation refresh.
Recommended: stay. Refurbished 3 racks. Saved $4.1M / 5y.
2023
Civic technology nonprofit
Stand up an observability practice for a 9-engineer team.
Practice established. 1 SLO per service, written by the team.
2022
Marine research consortium
Migrate a 22 TB acoustic archive off a discontinued tape format.
Migrated. Loss-checked at 100%. Index rewritten in Rust.
2022
Independent fintech
Reduce mean-time-to-detect from 22 to under 5 minutes.
Achieved 3:40. Two alert classes deleted as redundant.
2021
Regional hospital network
Audit a planned EMR migration before vendor selection.
Recommended: defer 18 months. Migration later succeeded.
04 / Voices
What it sounds like.
“They told us not to migrate. We almost fired them. Eighteen months later we paid them double to come back and supervise the migration they had originally said no to.”
“The forty-page diagnosis is the most honest document anyone has ever written about our company. We laminated a copy.”
“What infra.limited delivers is silence in your incident channel. You only realize how loud it was after.”
05 / Contact
If your problem
If your problem
has been written down,
we will read it.
Send a one-page note. Plain prose, no slide deck. We answer every message within seven days, even if the answer is no.