Architecture, infrastructure, and the code underneath.
Canary Crest is a small consultancy. We design systems, repair the ones that have gone sideways, and write the low-level code when it matters: failover and recovery, cloud spend, scale, migrations off the data centre, agent pipelines that survive production, trading systems measured in microseconds.
Services
Eight things we get called for. Most jobs are two or three of them at once.
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01
Disaster recovery and failover
Backups are easy. Restores are where it falls apart. We put a number on how long you can be down and how much data you can lose, then build and rehearse the failover until the number holds. Multi-region databases, tested restores, runbooks written for whoever happens to be awake.
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02
Cloud cost
We read the bill the way an auditor would. Oversized instances, forgotten environments, NAT and egress, storage with no lifecycle, commitments nobody bought. Fix the big items, add guardrails so it doesn't creep back. Thirty to fifty percent is typical, with nothing switched off that mattered.
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03
Scaling web applications
Load work. Caching, pooling, queues, replicas, sharding, autoscaling, and the architecture changes for when those run out. Load tested with real traffic shapes before and after, so the number improves in production and not just on the slide.
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04
Monoliths to the cloud, served globally
Getting a monolith off its one big machine without a rewrite. Containers, a pipeline, infrastructure as code, and only the splits the system actually needs. Then several regions behind a CDN, with a data layer designed for it, so a user in Singapore isn't waiting on a server in Virginia.
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05
Agent pipelines
LLM agents built like production software: tool calls with contracts, retrieval you can inspect, approval gates, an eval suite that runs in CI, logs, and a spend ceiling. Wired into the systems you already run, not bolted on beside them.
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06
Low-latency trading systems
Order routing, market data, risk. Lock-free queues, pinned cores, kernel bypass where the numbers justify it, deterministic replay so Tuesday's bug can be reproduced on Wednesday. Fast is the constraint. Correct is the job.
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07
C++ and systems work
Network stacks, storage engines, embedded targets, SDKs. Also the unglamorous version: a decade-old C++ codebase nobody wants to open, and a deadline.
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08
Platform and DevOps
CI/CD, infrastructure as code, secrets, observability, SLOs, an on-call rotation that doesn't burn people out. Designed so your developers ship without filing a ticket.
How we work
Four phases. Each is scoped and priced on its own. Stop after any of them and keep the output.
Assessment
We read the code, the architecture, the bill and the incident history. You get a written report: what is wrong, what it is costing, what we would do first and why.
Design
The target architecture, the migration path, the risks, and a rollback for every step. Argued over with your team before anything gets built.
Build
In your repos, next to your engineers. Tests, infrastructure as code, documentation. A demo every week.
Handover
Runbooks, dashboards, a game day, and pairing until your team is bored of us. Retained support afterwards if you want it.
Engagement types
- Fixed scope
- An outcome, a price, a date. Assessments, cost work, migrations.
- Embedded
- One or two of us inside your team for a few months, working your roadmap.
- Retainer
- Hours each month for design reviews, second opinions and the occasional fire.
About
Canary Crest is run by people who have spent their careers on system design and operations at exchanges, SaaS companies and cloud providers. We have carried the pager for the kinds of systems described above. We stay small on purpose: there is no sales team, and the person on the first call is the person in your repo.
The name is from the canaries miners carried underground. They noticed first. That is most of the work: the backup nobody has restored, the queue with no ceiling, the region that is quietly a single point of failure, the line item doubling every quarter.
- Proven over clever, unless a measurement says otherwise.
- Everything lands in your repo with tests and docs. Nothing lives on our laptops.
- Every proposal comes with the metric that will prove it worked.
- If we are the wrong people for the job, we say so on the first call.
Get in touch
Describe the problem. You get a reply within two business days with a straight answer: whether we can help, roughly what it would take, and what we would want to look at first.
- The reply comes from the person who would do the work.
- NDA first, if you want one.
- Or email hello@canarycrest.com.