Anyone can `kubectl apply`. The hard part is everything around it — autoscaling that doesn't blow your bill, GitOps that doesn't go rogue, security that survives audit, observability that surfaces signal not noise. We staff CKA-certified engineers who've built and operated production EKS, GKE, and AKS for years.
$22/hr
CKA-certified engineer
5 days
Free FinOps + security audit
30–60%
Typical month-1 cost cut
New build, migration, optimization, or rescue — we'll match a senior K8s engineer in 24 hours.
Replies in 4 hours · NDA on request
Six engagement patterns we run constantly. Pick the one that matches the platform problem in front of you.
Production-grade EKS / GKE / AKS from scratch. Network design, IAM, node pools, GitOps, Helm chart standards, secrets management, and a developer platform that ships features on day one.
App-of-Apps pattern, ApplicationSets per environment, image automation, sync waves, multi-tenant RBAC, drift detection, and a clean ‘everything is in Git’ deployment story.
Right-size requests, switch to Karpenter, move steady workloads to Spot, tune HPA / VPA, dump abandoned namespaces. Typical 30–60% cost reduction in month one.
Pod Security Standards, default-deny NetworkPolicies, RBAC tightening, image signing with Cosign, runtime detection with Falco, OPA / Kyverno policy-as-code, External Secrets Operator.
Istio, Linkerd, or Cilium Service Mesh — chosen for your real requirements (mTLS, traffic shaping, multi-cluster) and not vendor preference. Migration paths from sidecar-heavy to ambient.
Prometheus + Thanos, Loki, Tempo / Jaeger, Grafana, OpenTelemetry collectors. SLO definition with Pyrra or Sloth, runbook-linked alerts. Or migration off expensive vendor APM.
Tooling we're fluent in — opinionated, but pragmatic. We pick what matches your maturity, not what's trending on Hacker News.
We start with a 5-day cluster audit. By Friday you have a cost report, a security scorecard, and a prioritized remediation plan — free.
Senior engineer profiles cost (Kubecost / OpenCost), security posture (kube-bench, Polaris), reliability (PDBs, HPA tuning, node groups), and observability gaps. Report + remediation plan delivered Friday.
Implement the 3–5 highest-impact changes from the audit — typically right-sizing, autoscaler swap, and kill-list of abandoned namespaces. Measurable savings in week one.
Platform pod (architect + 2 engineers) executes the full remediation roadmap — GitOps, security baseline, observability, service mesh. Two-week sprints with demos.
Transition to fractional SRE — 1–2 senior engineers on retainer for upgrades, incident response, capacity planning, and platform evolution.
Three engagement models. Free audit because every cluster has waste — we'd rather show you than sell you.
5 days
Free
Senior engineer + your platform team. Cost, security, reliability, observability scorecards. Prioritised remediation plan. No commitment.
Build → Stabilize
$14K – $45K/mo
Architect + engineers + SRE. Full remediation, GitOps, security, observability program. Fixed monthly burn.
Monthly retainer
$22 – $55/hr
Steady-state. Senior engineers on retainer for upgrades, incident response, and platform evolution.
We treat your cluster like production — because it is. Engineering discipline, not YAML cowboys.
EKS, GKE, AKS, on-prem. We pick the right substrate for your team — not the one we know best.
Cost dashboards, right-sizing, autoscaler tuning, and Spot strategy baked into every engagement.
Default-deny networking, signed images, runtime detection. Your next pen test isn’t a panic event.
We pick boring, proven tools when they fit. We’ll only introduce the new shiny when it earns its complexity.
All three. Most of our engineers carry CKA (Certified Kubernetes Administrator) plus a cloud-specific certification (AWS DevOps, GCP Professional Cloud Architect, or Azure Solutions Expert). We deploy regularly on EKS with Karpenter, GKE Autopilot, and AKS with workload identity. We also work on bare-metal and Rancher / OpenShift / EKS Anywhere when on-prem is the requirement.
Yes — and we’ll opinionate. ArgoCD for app delivery (App-of-Apps pattern, ApplicationSets, sync waves, auto-pruning), Flux when you want stronger Kustomize integration. Helm charts versioned in OCI registries, Kustomize overlays per environment, image automation with Renovate or ArgoCD Image Updater. Drift detection, sealed secrets or external secrets operator, and full audit trail in Git.
Yes. Typical audit finds 30–60% waste in the first week. We profile pod requests vs actuals with Kubecost or OpenCost, right-size requests and limits, switch to Karpenter or Cluster Autoscaler, move steady workloads to Spot / Preemptible / Savings Plans, kill abandoned namespaces, and tune HPA / VPA. We hand you a tagged cost dashboard and a written savings report after week one.
Yes — and we’ll talk you out of it when you don’t need one. Istio when you need ambient mode, fine-grained mTLS, traffic shaping, or multi-cluster federation. Linkerd when simplicity and ultra-low overhead matter. Cilium for eBPF-native networking, network policy, and Hubble observability. We’ve migrated teams from sidecar-heavy Istio to Cilium Service Mesh and slashed their resource overhead.
Default-secure cluster posture: Pod Security Standards (Restricted), default-deny network policies with Calico or Cilium, RBAC scoped to least privilege, image signing with Cosign and admission control via Sigstore policy controller, runtime detection with Falco, OPA Gatekeeper or Kyverno for policy as code, secrets via External Secrets Operator pulling from Vault or AWS Secrets Manager. Compliance scanning aligned to CIS Kubernetes Benchmark.
Yes. Prometheus + Thanos for long-term metric storage, kube-state-metrics + node-exporter, Grafana dashboards for golden signals per service. OpenTelemetry collectors for traces, Tempo / Jaeger as the backend. Loki for logs, with structured JSON logging at the app level. SLO definition with Pyrra or Sloth, alerting via Alertmanager into PagerDuty / Opsgenie. We’ll replace your $40K/month Datadog bill with the open stack if it makes sense.
Senior CKA-certified engineers from $22/hr, platform / SRE specialists from $30/hr, principal-level architects (CKA + CKS + cloud cert) from $45/hr. Most engagements run as a 2–4 person platform pod billed monthly ($14K–$45K/month) for a defined program (cluster build, migration, FinOps overhaul, security hardening). Free 5-day audit before any commitment.
We'll send a senior CKA + CKS engineer, profile your cost and security posture, and hand you a remediation plan with measured savings by Friday.