Real platforms, real outcomes
Here's how we've helped ambitious companies transform fragile infrastructure into platforms that scale.
Harborline Health Systems: Secure Cloud Modernization
Healthcare software provider | 100+ engineers | AWS
The situation
Harborline operates patient scheduling and outcomes software for 40+ regional healthcare systems. They'd been running on a combination of legacy on-premises infrastructure and aging AWS resources. As they grew to 100+ engineers and $50M ARR, they hit a hard wall: their infrastructure couldn't support the compliance rigor, deployment velocity, or team autonomy they needed.
Deployments took 2 weeks (manual, high-risk). Infrastructure work was bottlenecked by a 3-person ops team. HIPAA compliance required manual audits quarterly. Their cloud bill was opaque—they knew they were overspending but couldn't identify where.
The challenge
- • Migrate legacy workloads without business disruption
- • Build HIPAA-compliant AWS foundation from scratch
- • Accelerate deployment frequency 10x
- • Enable 100 engineers to provision environments self-service
- • Achieve SOC 2 Type II compliance
- • Reduce cloud costs 30%+
What we did
- ✓ Designed 3-account AWS landing zone with compartmentalization
- ✓ Built infrastructure-as-code with Terraform for all environments
- ✓ Implemented IAM framework with SAML federation
- ✓ Deployed GitHub Actions CI/CD with automated testing
- ✓ Built internal developer platform for environment provisioning
- ✓ Configured automated compliance scanning
Outcomes
Deployment Lead Time
2 weeks → 2 days
10x improvement
Environment Provisioning
2 hours → 5 min
Self-service, 24/7
Cloud Cost Savings
$180K/mo
30% reduction
Compliance
Automated quarterly compliance scanning cut audit prep time from 90 days to 30 days.
Team Autonomy
Infrastructure team went from 3 firefighters to platform stewards. Ops toil decreased 60%.
Capabilities deployed
Engagement: 14 weeks | 2 senior engineers | Completed 2024
Northstar Freight Network: Observability & Kubernetes Overhaul
Logistics technology platform | 60+ engineers | AWS + GCP
The situation
Northstar operates a real-time freight optimization platform used by thousands of trucking companies daily. They'd migrated to Kubernetes 18 months prior, but the migration was incomplete: they were running on underprovisioned clusters, had no observability into container workloads, and experienced regular incidents that took 4+ hours to resolve.
Their on-call rotation was burning out. Alert storms made it impossible to identify real issues. Their platform team had 2 engineers trying to support 60 application engineers. They knew they needed to invest in reliability, but didn't know where to start.
The challenge
- • Reduce MTTR from 4+ hours to under 30 minutes
- • Eliminate on-call burnout through alert rationalization
- • Implement comprehensive observability (logs, metrics, traces)
- • Optimize Kubernetes cluster cost and performance
- • Enable developers to troubleshoot independently
- • Define and track SLOs for critical services
What we did
- ✓ Rightsized Kubernetes clusters and optimized node groups
- ✓ Deployed Prometheus + Grafana observability stack
- ✓ Configured distributed tracing with Jaeger
- ✓ Built centralized logging with Loki
- ✓ Defined SLOs and error budgets for 15 critical services
- ✓ Rebuilt alert rules from scratch (reduced 200 → 40)
Outcomes
Mean Time to Resolution
4h 15m → 18m
14x improvement
Alert Count
200 → 40
80% reduction
Cluster Cost
$140K → $85K/mo
39% savings
On-Call Experience
Alert signal-to-noise ratio improved from 3:1 to 1:20. On-call team morale increased significantly.
Developer Self-Service
Developers can now investigate 80% of issues independently using dashboards and traces. Escalations dropped 60%.
Capabilities deployed
Engagement: 12 weeks | 2 senior engineers | Completed 2024
Calder & Rowe Financial Services: Governed Multi-Account Foundation
Financial operations software | 40+ engineers | AWS
The situation
Calder & Rowe provides transaction reconciliation and compliance software for investment firms. They operate under PCI-DSS, SOX, and GLBA requirements. As they grew, their AWS account sprawl became chaotic—different teams using different patterns, inconsistent security posture, no visibility into compliance status.
Their annual audits were nightmares: 90 days of manual evidence gathering, 50+ audit findings, and no clear path to improvement. They needed a governance framework that would satisfy auditors while allowing teams to move fast.
The challenge
- • Design multi-account strategy for compliance isolation
- • Implement policy-as-code guardrails without blocking dev
- • Automate compliance evidence collection
- • Reduce audit cycle from 90 days to 30 days
- • Enable teams to provision resources self-service
- • Maintain compliance across 12+ AWS accounts
What we did
- ✓ Designed 12-account AWS organization structure
- ✓ Implemented OPA/Kyverno for policy enforcement
- ✓ Built automated compliance scanning with Config Rules
- ✓ Configured centralized logging and CloudTrail
- ✓ Established change approval workflow for prod
- ✓ Built compliance dashboard for auditors
Outcomes
Audit Cycle Time
90 days → 30 days
67% reduction
Audit Findings
50+ → 3
94% improvement
Time to Remediate
2 weeks → 2 hours
98% faster
Governance Without Friction
Compliance is now automated. Teams get near-instant feedback on policy violations, not audit findings months later.
Auditor Confidence
Real-time compliance dashboard gives auditors confidence. They can verify controls continuously instead of once a year.
Capabilities deployed
Engagement: 16 weeks | 2 senior engineers | Completed 2024
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Every company's challenges are unique, but the approach is always the same: pragmatic engineering, hands-on partnership, and measurable outcomes.
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