Senior infrastructure help, on demand
I'm a Sr. Systems Software Engineer who runs production infrastructure for a living — OpenStack, Kubernetes, Terraform, and the observability stack behind them. Hire me for a fixed-price audit or ongoing consulting, and get a senior engineer's judgment without a full-time hire.
- OpenStack
- Kolla-Ansible
- Kubernetes
- Terraform
- GitLab CI/CD
- Apache Guacamole
- VictoriaMetrics
- Prometheus
- Grafana
- Ubuntu Linux
- Python
Know exactly what you'll pay — and what you'll get
Each audit is a flat fee, a clear scope, and a written report you can act on. No open-ended hours, no surprises.
Kubernetes Health Check
$300$150Teams running production K8s who want a senior set of eyes before (or after) something breaks.
- Review of workloads, resource requests/limits, and autoscaling
- RBAC, network policy, and Pod Security gaps
- Probe, rollout, and reliability anti-patterns
- Prioritized findings + concrete remediation steps
Secure Stripe checkout · tell me your stack at checkout · I'll email within 1 business day to confirm scope.
OpenStack / Kolla-Ansible Review
$450$225Private-cloud and Kolla-Ansible operators — a rare skillset most consultants simply do not have.
- Nova / Neutron / Cinder / Keystone configuration review
- Kolla-Ansible inventory, globals, and upgrade-path assessment
- HA, quotas, and capacity-planning sanity check
- Risk-ranked report with upgrade and hardening guidance
Secure Stripe checkout · tell me your stack at checkout · I'll email within 1 business day to confirm scope.
Terraform / IaC Audit
$250$125Teams whose Terraform has grown organically and now feels risky to change.
- State, backend, and module-structure review
- Drift, secrets-handling, and blast-radius analysis
- CI/CD pipeline and plan-review workflow check
- Refactor plan (moved/import) + policy-as-code recommendations
Secure Stripe checkout · tell me your stack at checkout · I'll email within 1 business day to confirm scope.
Observability Review
$300$150Teams drowning in noisy alerts or flying blind — Prometheus, VictoriaMetrics, and Grafana.
- Metrics pipeline + cardinality and retention review
- Alert-rule quality and pager-fatigue reduction
- SLO / error-budget and dashboard design feedback
- Action plan for signal you can actually trust at 3am
Secure Stripe checkout · tell me your stack at checkout · I'll email within 1 business day to confirm scope.
Hourly consulting
from $150/hour
Stuck on a gnarly OpenStack, Kubernetes, or Terraform problem? Pair with me to debug it, design it, or unblock your team. Billed in focused blocks.
Start a conversationFractional / retainer
Custom / month
Ongoing senior infrastructure support for a fixed monthly fee — CI/CD, platform, observability, and on-call-grade guidance without carrying a full-time hire.
Discuss a retainerSimple, low-risk, senior
Intro call
A free 30-minute call to understand your stack, your pain, and whether I can actually help. No pitch.
Scope & quote
A fixed scope, a fixed price, and a clear deliverable — in writing — before any work starts.
Deliver
You get a prioritized, actionable report (and a walkthrough), usually within a week.
A rare combination of production scars
Plenty of consultants know Kubernetes. Very few have also run OpenStack with Kolla-Ansible, wired up VictoriaMetrics and Grafana at scale, and shipped Apache Guacamole and Terraform-managed infrastructure in production. That breadth means I see how the pieces fail together — not just in isolation.
I write about this work in depth, too. Browse the DevOps guides and the prompt library to see how I think before you ever book a call.
James Joyner IV
Sr. Systems Software Engineer · San Jose, CA
Every audit and consulting engagement is done by me personally — James Joyner IV — not a content team or a junior contractor. I build and run large-scale, widely distributed Linux systems (AWS, CentOS/Ubuntu, and OpenStack with Kolla-Ansible) and the observability behind them. You're hiring the same person who writes the guides and prompts on this site.
The following are representative examples of the types of feedback we aim to earn from clients. They are illustrative until public customer references become available.
“We were dealing with recurring OpenStack issues that took hours to diagnose. The structured troubleshooting process quickly narrowed the problem down and gave us a repeatable workflow our team still uses.”
“The Terraform review highlighted issues our internal reviews had missed and provided practical recommendations we could implement immediately. The guidance was concise, actionable, and clearly based on real operational experience.”
Evaluating the platform for your team?
Security practices, live system status, support levels, the product changelog, and enterprise capabilities — with existing features clearly separated from planned ones.
Have a problem worth a senior pair of eyes?
Start with a free intro call. If I'm not the right person, I'll tell you — and point you somewhere better.