For typical scenarios I offer solutions with a price fixed in advance.
Depending on the frequency of your needs, get Rapid advice occasionally, or access an Expert on demand regularly.
My Site assessment, PostgreSQL performance assessment, Continuous delivery assessment, and Project brief workshop offers has a fixed scope too.
Rapid advice
In a hurry? Bring a topic and get an expert advice through this no-nonsense fast track access to my 18+ years of experience.
Typical scenarios include small and urgent tasks, such as:
- I keep getting these reports about my email server. I’d like to know why, and whether I should change something.
- An unusually large group of new colleagues will start next week, and I’d like to start using Azure services to centrally manage their work equipment.
- We have several PostgreSQL databases hosted on AWS RDS, and I’d like to check if our backup strategy meets our business expectations.
- We’d like to solve a new business case by creating a new subsystem on AWS, and I need to check if it’s reasonable.
- I want to store 10 TB for 40 years, and not sure what to buy for such a data archival challenge.
Book a session now for €150/1h, €280/2h, or €390/3h.
Expert on demand
I believe all organizations should have access to professional support on a regular basis regardless of their size or budget constraints, and even if their challenges do not warrant full-time engagement.
For those situations I offer reserving capacity in the following typical setups:
- Advisory: consult 1-3 hours per week or per sprint, ideal to track progress, or for mentoring, and pair programming sessions
- Fractional: spend 1-3 hours per day to take care of the most important tasks, for example to check current state of progress and systems to prevent issues from escalating
- Interim: dedicate 4-6 hours per day for concentrated efforts towards strategic goals
These arrangements include a reaction time within the next business day, and access to extra capacity subject to availability and surcharge. A progressive discount may apply for long-term, high-volume, pay-in-advance, and free/libre/open source orders.
Contact me now to discuss your own requirements.
Site assessment
All my assignments start with an initial assessment of the current setup in place. You may need an independent overview to make decisions about next steps, prepare for strategic alliances, or even to make an offer.
My site assessment evaluates at least the following:
- infrastructure inventory
- organizational and operational practices
- business continuity and disaster recovery
- security policy
- change management
- regular maintenance
- provided services
- monitoring
Optionally I can attach an actionable, prioritized list of any identified improvement opportunities.
Such an assessment typically takes 2-4 weeks, and pricing starts at €8900.
PostgreSQL performance assessment
I solve reliability, performance, and cost challenges related to PostgreSQL. I enabled teams to grow databases beyond terabyte scale, while working with different hosting platforms, including Heroku, Amazon RDS, and physical machines.
My evidence-based comprehensive approach identifies bottlenecks to create an actionable improvement plan – though I don’t solely deliver a final report with a checklist for you to address later.
I work together with your team during the process to open pull requests, tune configuration settings, and apply infrastructure changes. This enables benefiting early from each improvement gradually, and continuously acting on new information, while sharing how to keep the database tidy.
The assessment includes at least the following starter checklist:
- Identify usage patterns, slow queries, and their bottlenecks
- Check cache hit ratio for indexes and tables
- Fit high-level CPU, RAM, storage, and network settings to the given use case
- Remove unused indexes, add missing indexes, and optimize remaining indexes
- Check logs for both expected and unusual patterns
- Review locks and timeout settings
- Identify table and index bloat
- Tidy up manually with VACUUM/ANALYZE/pg_repack if needed
- Ensure autovacuum settings can keep the database tidy
- Check data safety and business continuity settings
Such an assessment typically takes 2-4 weeks, and pricing starts at €8900.
Continuous delivery assessment
Continuous delivery improves software delivery processes across the board: faster cadence, higher quality, and better teamwork. No wonder most teams and managers wish to adopt this approach.
While some may think they won’t need anything else besides introducing a new service they like, they often surprised by the wide range of development aspects it affects: from organizing work items, through using a fitting version control strategy, to automating tests.
As both contributor to and signatory of Minimum Viable CD, I believe there’s a core set of practices required to start gaining the expected benefits while avoiding common pitfalls and mistakes.
I can assess your software delivery approach to identify gaps and improvement opportunities on your way towards adopting continuous delivery.
Such an assessment typically takes 2-4 weeks, and pricing starts at €8900.
Project brief workshop
A project brief ensures shared understanding of the important details between parties, and allows a provider to make a matching offer. It contains the following sections:
- customer profile, context, and key roles
- project goals and scope
- intended approach
- technical requirements
- available budget
- timeline and deadlines
- dependencies
- contractual details
If you’d like to approach different providers about the same project, I can help you create a brief to use as a common starting point.
Such a workshop typically fits into my standard Rapid advice offer.