01
Architecture and design
New data platforms, reviews of existing ones, and the hard tradeoffs that come with scale.
You’re overspending on data infrastructure your vendor designed.
We diagnose what went wrong, show you exactly what it’s costing, and stay to fix it. Founded by a 20+ year veteran of Silicon Valley data technology, Apache Cassandra PMC member, and O’Reilly Author.
50+ conference talks Making teams successful from pre-seed to Fortune 500
Overspending is one symptom. Here’s what else we see.
02
Migrations and modernization
Off legacy databases, into distributed systems, without the year-long disasters.
03
Cost and efficiency
The thesis you just read. Diagnostic reviews that show what your stack really costs and what it should cost.
04
AI and the data layer
Vector, RAG, retrieval architecture, and the storage economics that make AI features actually shippable.
Every engagement is led by someone who has shipped production data systems for decades. We don’t hand off to juniors.
Why teams bring us in early
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’ve 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. Co-author of Managing Cloud Native Data on Kubernetes (O’Reilly). Reviewed production data architectures for teams from seed stage to Fortune 500.
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.
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.