Architecture decisions are the most expensive decisions in software. Get them right early and everything else is easier. Get them wrong and you spend years working around structural problems that no amount of refactoring at the edges will fix. We help teams make good architectural decisions - and implement them properly.
What we deliver
Architecture assessment and review. We review existing systems to identify structural problems, scalability bottlenecks, and maintainability risks. The deliverable is a prioritised set of recommendations with clear rationale, effort estimates, and migration paths - not a slide deck of aspirational target-state diagrams.
System design for new builds. We design system architectures from first principles: understanding the domain, the quality attributes that matter (latency, throughput, consistency, availability), the team's capabilities, and the operational constraints. Then we choose patterns and technologies that fit.
Microservices and service decomposition. We help teams decompose monoliths into services when - and only when - it genuinely reduces complexity. We've seen too many organisations adopt microservices and end up with a distributed monolith that's harder to debug and deploy than what they started with. We help you avoid that.
Event-driven architecture. Service Bus, Event Hubs, Kafka, event sourcing, saga patterns. We design event-driven systems for workloads that benefit from asynchronous processing, temporal decoupling, and eventual consistency - with proper error handling, dead-letter management, and observability.
CQRS and read-model separation. For systems where read and write workloads have fundamentally different characteristics, we design and implement Command Query Responsibility Segregation patterns that let each side scale independently.
Modular monoliths. Not everything needs to be microservices. We design modular monolith architectures with clear boundaries, dependency rules, and module contracts - giving you the organisational benefits of service boundaries without the operational complexity of distributed systems.
API design and gateway patterns. Backend-for-frontend patterns, API gateway composition, GraphQL federation, versioning strategies. We design API layers that serve consumers well without coupling backend services to frontend requirements.
How we work
We don't produce architecture in isolation and throw it over the wall. We work embedded with your engineering team - designing collaboratively, validating through prototyping, and refining through implementation. Architecture that the team doesn't understand or can't maintain is worthless.
Technologies
.NET, C#, TypeScript, Azure, AWS, SQL Server, Cosmos DB, Kafka, Service Bus, Event Hubs, Redis, Docker, Kubernetes. We're technology-pragmatic - the architecture drives the technology choices, not the other way around.