Senior advisory for the data and AI infrastructure that doesn’t get rebuilt.
Founded and led by Patrick McFadin: Apache Cassandra PMC member, O’Reilly author, twenty years across the architecture decisions that became your stack. We do the work directly. We don’t hand off to juniors.
Apache Cassandra PMC O’Reilly Author Former VP, DataStax (IBM) 100+ architecture reviews 20+ years in Silicon Valley data
Start here
Five ways to engage. Pick the one that fits.
Every engagement starts with a 30-minute call. No deck, no pitch. If you are not sure which shape fits, just book the call.
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01
You inherited the system, or you are about to commit to one
Architecture Review
A bounded diagnostic. Written report, executive readout, prioritized action list. The most common front-door engagement.
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02
Decisions keep stacking up and there is no senior peer to test them against
Strategic Advisory
A standing slot on your calendar for the calls that only get made once. Architecture, migrations, vendor bake-offs, hiring scorecards.
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03
You need senior leadership in the seat for a quarter or two
Fractional CDO
Embedded acting Chief Data or AI Officer. One to three days a week. The seat a VP of Data would own, without the eighteen-month search.
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04
A specific build with a hard deadline and the team needs senior hands
Tiger Team
Senior operators in the repo with your team. Cassandra migrations, performance work, production readiness, AI data pipelines. Bounded scope, clean handoff.
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05
The team needs to learn the system you have built
Bespoke Training
Cassandra and cloud-native data, taught for a decade. AI coding tools (Claude Code, Cursor, agent workflows), taught from production use.
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If you are a data or AI vendor working through positioning, content, DevRel, community, or analyst strategy, see the dedicated page for GTM advisory for vendors. Same operator, different conversation.
Why teams bring us in
Most data infrastructure problems get decided in the first architecture meeting. The wrong decision shows up eighteen months later as a migration, a rewrite, or a seven-figure cloud bill. We have been in those meetings for twenty years, and more importantly, we remember them.
Founded and led by Patrick McFadin. He was in the room when Spark was a research project at UC Berkeley and when Kafka was an internal LinkedIn tool. He knew the people building them, and he was part of a lot of the decisions that became the systems your team is running now. He’s been a committer and PMC member on Apache Cassandra since the project was young enough that those titles meant sitting in a chat room at midnight, not a line on a résumé. Thirteen years at DataStax, VP and Principal, through its 2025 acquisition by IBM. Co-author of Managing Cloud Native Data on Kubernetes (O’Reilly).
He knows which architectural bets paid off because he watched them get made. He knows which ones quietly got walked back because he was there for those conversations too. More on the founder →
In the room today
Talks and writing.
The work that brought you here is probably ongoing. Recent talks, conference sessions, and writing live at the links below.
Talks
Planet Cassandra YouTube channel →
Recent conference sessions, panels, and technical deep-dives on distributed data, Cassandra, AI infrastructure, and the architecture decisions that follow.
Writing
patrickmcfadin.com →
Long-form writing on data infrastructure, what is happening in the field, and what we are watching across distributed data and AI.
Let’s look at it together.
Bring us whatever you’re wrestling with. A new architecture, a migration plan, a bill that keeps growing, a team that needs a sounding board. Thirty minutes, no pitch. We’ve been having this conversation in hallways and mailing lists for twenty years. This is the version where it has your name on it.