Let's work together!

We know how to help your team succeed with cloud native software development and infrastructure management. We have been partnering with organizations to make their teams more effective for decades.

When you’re ready to say goodbye to long build and deploy times, undocumented configuration practices, legacy automation tooling, sloppy secret handling, manual, repetitive, error prone resource management, and direct server access, let’s collaborate!

How we work

Scaleout is a unique technical consultancy.

  • We are flexible with scheduling. We believe a successful project must be an exciting learning experience for your team. Overworked engineers can’t learn and idle consultants are a waste of resources. We match the pace of your organization with a plan that recognizes the availability of your staff.
  • We help organizations move past endless discussions about what might be possible by anchoring experimental thinking with implementation. Rapid iteration on something good is the fastest and most reliable way to build something great.
  • Our years of experience as full stack platform engineers, engineering managers, business unit directors, and open source contributors means we’re able to meet your team where they’re at as leaders and technical peers.
  • We want to be your trusted advisor, helping your organization to succeed with modern technology in a sustainable way without our continued involvement. We are cloud agnostic practitioners and have no vested interest or partnerships with any particular tech stacks or tools.

There are four ways we typically engage with an organization:

Technical partnerships

In principle, we believe that all team members should be able to interact with a running version of your software within ten minutes of a developer committing code. In practice, every organization needs something different to get there. Our experience with different programming languages, architectures, and tooling puts us in a powerful position to solve your organization’s unique challenges.

We are polyglot full stack developers with experience maintaining software using industry leading open source tooling across multiple cloud providers. We have built networks from the ground up and integrated industry standard authentication and authorization flows. We want to help you ship stable code faster and maintain the uptime of critical systems when it matters most. We strive to be your trusted advisors for modern deployment workflows and deliver a developer experience that is seamless and self-service.

Pricing

  • Hourly rate $250/hr
  • Minimum of 1 day per week
  • Maximum of 3 days per week
  • Minimum engagement length of 8 weeks

What we need to get started:

  • A dedicated member or members of your team to collaborate with
  • Routine communication with stakeholders to establish goals, deadlines, etc
  • Access to relevant systems and tooling
  • Access to a unified messaging system (slack, teams, etc)
  • Access to a dedicated planning board (jira or similar)

Maturity assessments

If you’re an organization about to undertake a major technological transformation it can be hard to navigate all of the what-ifs, especially when your only advisors may be more interested in the appearance of progress rather than real organizational value. As experienced cross cloud practitioners and platform engineers we are uniquely suited to be your trusted advisor for change. We will spend two weeks conducting interviews with your team members, identifying maturity gaps, and providing actionable advice to best set you up for success. In terms of generic cloud maturity evaluation, we favor the OWASP DevSecOps Maturity Model (DSOMM) because it is the most actionable and provides a useful superset over known ISO standards of mature engineering practices.

This collaboration option can also be modified to focus on specific communities of practice like continuous delivery, vulnerability management, observability, containerization practices, etc.

Pricing

  • 2.5 week hands on assessment period $25,000
  • On-site as necessary (travel costs additional)

What we need to get started:

  • Time with stakeholders to review evaluation criteria
  • Access to relevant systems and tooling
  • Access to a unified messaging system (slack, teams, etc)
  • Access to select team members to conduct interviews

Dedicated projects

Sometimes your team is lacking familiarity with a technology or just too busy to implement something. We can help deliver a few of those out of reach items on your team’s infrastructure automation, software delivery, and observability wish list.

Pricing

  • Hourly rate $200/hr
  • 3 week minimum project length

What we need to get started:

  • Time with stakeholders to review goals, deadlines, etc
  • Access to relevant systems and tooling
  • Access to a unified messaging system (slack, teams, etc)
  • Access to a dedicated planning board (jira or similar)

Continued access

There are lots of reasons it’s helpful to have a trusted technical advisor or individual contributor available at a moment’s notice. Maybe it’s supporting your engineering team when dealing with persistent outages of an existing unreliable application, learning a new technology, or participating in architectural planning meetings for an upcoming migration effort.

We can help by drawing on our years of experience supporting diverse technologies, cloud vendors, and architectures.

Pricing

  • Monthly retainer $1,000
  • Hourly incident cost $250/hr
  • Violated SLAs receive pro-rated billing credits up to 100% of term fee

SLAs

  • Slack/Messaging responses during business hours within 1 hour
  • Phone availability 24/7 and call back within 10 minutes if missed
  • Advance notice of time off coverage changes

What we need to get started:

  • Time with your team to review architecture, workflows, and code
  • Access to view logs, metrics, system status
  • Access to a messaging system (slack, teams, etc) with your team
  • Access to relevant systems and tooling

Our Experience

In our twenty plus years of experience we have:

  • Led a fortune 500 organization on the complex multi-year technical and organizational journey that is migrating critical systems away from legacy on-premise installations to the cloud.

  • Transformed a higher education organization’s multi-week release cycle into a fully automated self service experience that can build and deploy self-contained copies of legacy systems in less than 20 minutes.

  • Helped a large federal contractor navigate CMMC compliance in the cloud

  • Architected, built and supported platforms running monolithic and microservice based stacks.

  • Played an integral role on both sides of the monolith vs microservices journey for numerous organizations. We’ve broken down unwieldy monoliths and recombined overly specialized microservices. We know first hand that microservices are not a magic one size fits all solution.

  • Built multiple real-time collaborative and data streaming architectures and ETL pipelines that have stood up to production level traffic for years.

  • Run trainings for organizations looking to make better use of automation technologies like terraform and kubernetes.

  • Helped migrate and refactor large terraform projects to terraform enterprise and terraform cloud.

  • Contributed to and maintained major open source projects.

Our Values

Help others grow

Teach individuals and teams so they can continue on successfully without us. We are here to help others succeed, that’s the bottom line.

Honesty over organizational politics

Say what needs to be said even if it’s hard to hear, without fear, in a direct, humane way. We are here to help, not protect our contract at whatever cost.

Agility

Move quickly and adapt as circumstances or people need us to. Feedback is the best thing that can happen; adjust and keep going.

Authenticity

Show up with confidence as ourselves and encourage others to do the same. It builds trust, helps clients open up to grow, and centers the work on the people actually doing it. The tech is secondary to being a human, interacting with other humans.

Work without ego

Our goal is not to be right or have every answer, our goal is to be helpful and shepherd situations to positive outcomes. We’re here for the client above all, it’s about their success not our ego.