2 to 4 weeks
Focused assessment
Review the live estate and produce a current-state brief, ranked risks, and a staffable first sequence.
Reduce cloud risk without pausing product delivery.
Asteron reviews live architecture, recent releases, and incident history. Each engagement turns that evidence into a ranked plan, a defined implementation slice, and artifacts the client team owns.
Focused assessment: 3 to 5 weeks.
Cloud foundations
Cloud accounts accumulate around product launches, acquisitions, and urgent delivery work. Teams can deploy new services, but identity rules, network boundaries, logging, and cost ownership follow different patterns in each environment.
Evidence reviewed
- Account and network topology
- Identity, access, and secrets handling
- Logging, metrics, and trace coverage
- Backup, recovery, and environment parity
- Cost allocation and capacity headroom
Work in scope
- Current-state review with the engineers who operate the system
- Risk register ranked by service impact and recovery cost
- Target foundation with ownership and decision boundaries
- Sequenced plan for the first implementation slice
Handoff artifacts
- Architecture assessment
- Risk register
- Observability plan
- Technical decision records
Illustrative engagement: Northline Analytics
A product analytics team with three launch-driven cloud accounts would receive an account map, identity boundary plan, telemetry baseline, and implementation sequence that keeps current delivery moving.
Implementation sprint: 4 to 6 weeks, including a tabletop review.
Reliability engineering
Teams often add alerts after an incident without removing old noise or naming an owner. During the next failure, the on-call engineer reconstructs service context from chat history while customer impact continues.
Evidence reviewed
- Service inventory and current owners
- Alert quality and on-call load
- Incident communication paths
- Recovery steps used in recent incidents
- Service objectives tied to customer actions
Work in scope
- Reliability baseline built from production evidence
- Service objectives agreed with engineering and operations leads
- Incident roles sized for the current team
- Short runbooks for costly failure modes
Handoff artifacts
- Service ownership map
- Incident response playbooks
- Observability plan
- Release readiness checklist
Illustrative engagement: Harborline Payments
A payments team with noisy paging would receive alert standards tied to customer-facing failures, named ownership for six services, and a tabletop-tested incident process.
Assessment: 3 to 4 weeks. Implementation sprint: 4 to 8 weeks.
Platform modernization
Legacy platforms slow releases and concentrate knowledge in a few engineers. A replacement plan must account for the traffic, integrations, and delivery work that the current system still carries.
Illustrative engagement: Kestrel Media Group
A publishing team leaving a tightly coupled monolith would start with billing and identity boundaries, documented interfaces, rollback conditions, and a roadmap the internal team can continue.
Evidence reviewed
- Changes that create the most delay or risk
- Dependencies that block service separation
- Operational load created by the current stack
- Skills the team already has
- Release and rollback paths
Work in scope
- Modernization roadmap tied to release and recovery constraints
- Service extraction sequence that keeps delivery moving
- Decision records for the first architecture changes
- Handoff plan with client owners for each new boundary
Handoff artifacts
- Modernization roadmap
- Risk register
- Technical decision records
- Release readiness checklist
Focused engagement: 3 to 6 weeks, based on team size.
Illustrative engagement: Fieldnote Health
A clinical workflow team whose release process depends on two senior engineers would receive an ownership map, a deploy checklist based on recent releases, and a quarterly readiness review format.
Operational readiness
Product growth can outpace the release and recovery practices around it. A few engineers carry the deploy sequence, service ownership is unclear, and runbooks sit apart from the tools used during an incident.
Evidence reviewed
- Release steps used in recent production changes
- Ownership gaps across services and environments
- Handoffs between product, platform, and operations
- Documents opened during recent incidents
- Resilience actions with owners and due dates
Work in scope
- Written operating model with named service owners
- Release and rollback checklists based on recent deploys
- Documentation structure aligned with incident work
- Repeatable readiness review for engineering leadership
Handoff artifacts
- Service ownership map
- Release readiness checklist
- Incident response playbooks
- Technical decision records
Engagement model
Start with a bounded brief. Each option defines the decision, deliverables, owners, and exit criteria before work begins.
4 to 8 weeks
Implementation sprint
Deliver one defined slice from the plan, such as an observability baseline, release controls, or the first runbooks.
Monthly
Ongoing advisory
Review architecture decisions, readiness evidence, and incident actions as the platform changes.
Describe the system and the decision in front of you.
Share the current constraint, the change you are considering, and the delivery window. Asteron will define the smallest useful review or implementation sprint.