← Back to home

Deploy Infrastructure Audit

A four-to-six-week architectural review for engineering organizations whose deploys cost more than they should.

Book a 30-minute scoping call

When this is the right engagement

Your team is shipping. Your platform is “mostly working.” Your dashboards are mostly green. And yet:

If three or more of those describe your organization, this engagement is calibrated for you.

What the audit produces

Three deliverables, plus a 90-minute executive readout.

1. Current-state map

A visual and written document of your deploy infrastructure as it actually exists — hosts, networks, daemons, registries, cache substrates, environment variable scoping, deploy timing patterns. Most engineering organizations have never produced this in one place. The map alone resolves the most common gap I see in audits: the CTO's mental model, the engineering team's mental model, and the actual configuration are all different, and nobody has reconciled them.

2. Prioritized risk register

Every compound state issue I find, ranked by likelihood × blast radius. Some are urgent. Most are not. The ones that are not are still in the register, because they will become urgent and your team will be firefighting them at 2am if you don't sequence them earlier. The register is built for ongoing reference, not as a one-time deliverable.

3. Intervention sequence with cost-benefit per item

Written in the language a CFO can read. This is the document you take into a budget conversation when you need to justify infrastructure investment that your company has been deferring. Each intervention has projected cost, projected savings (in the four cost categories: direct hours, opportunity, attrition risk, deferred capability), and a sequencing recommendation.

The 90-minute executive readout walks your senior leadership through all three deliverables and answers questions live. This is included; not a separate engagement.

How the engagement runs

  1. Week 1

    Kickoff, access provisioning, and initial interviews with senior engineers and the platform/SRE team. I want the people doing the firefighting to tell me what hurts before I read any logs.

  2. Weeks 2-3

    Configuration audit across all your environments, log review of the last 90 days of deploys (every failure, every retry, every silent timeout), deeper interviews with engineering leadership.

  3. Week 4

    Synthesis. Draft of the current-state map and risk register goes to your team for fact-checking. This isn't optional — the deliverables need to be accurate before they're useful, and your team will catch things I miss.

  4. Weeks 5-6

    (For 6-week engagements.) Intervention sequence drafting, executive readout preparation, final document refinement based on stakeholder feedback. For 4-week engagements this work happens in compressed form within Week 4.

Investment

$55,000–$75,000

Fixed-fee, scope-dependent.

The range reflects engineering organization size and environmental complexity. Smaller teams (15–40 engineers, three environments, single cloud provider) anchor at the lower end. Larger or more complex setups (50+ engineers, multi-region, hybrid cloud, multiple deploy platforms) anchor higher.

Engagement length within the four-to-six week range is determined during the discovery call based on scope.

What’s not included

  • Implementation of the intervention sequence. The audit produces the prioritized backlog. Your team can execute it directly, or I can be retained for ongoing implementation advisory at $400/hour or as a fractional CTO retainer ($14,000–$28,000/month, scope-dependent). This is a deliberate split: the audit needs to be honest about your situation, and that honesty is harder to maintain when the same provider is selling you the implementation work.
  • Code review, security audit, or product roadmap work. These are different engagements with different methodologies. If you need them, I can refer you to specialists.

Who this is for

This is not the right engagement for solo founders with one service, organizations deploying once a quarter, or companies that already know exactly what’s wrong and need execution help rather than diagnosis. If that’s you, get in touch anyway and I’ll point you in a more useful direction.

About me

I spent eighteen years at IBM as Senior Managing Consultant and Enterprise Architect, advising Fortune 500 engineering organizations on platform and infrastructure architecture. I now run an independent practice focused specifically on the kind of compound infrastructure debt that doesn’t show up on dashboards but shows up on engineering org charts as attrition, missed roadmaps, and recurring 2am sessions. The audit methodology is built from two decades of seeing the same patterns repeat across companies that are otherwise nothing alike.

Next step

The audit starts with a 30-minute scoping call. The call is free. Its purpose is to confirm that your situation fits what I work on, and to scope the engagement length within the four-to-six-week range so that we can issue a fixed-fee proposal.

What you bring to the call: a rough sense of your environment count, engineering org size, deploy frequency, and the recurring failure patterns you’re seeing. I do not need access to systems or detailed information at this stage.

Book a 30-minute scoping call

If a call isn’t the right format for an initial conversation, you can also reach me directly at kayode@anthonyodole.com.

Frequently asked

How is this different from a typical engagement with a Big Four consulting firm?
Three differences. First, scope: this audit is one specific deliverable, not the open-ended scope expansion typical of larger firms. Second, who actually does the work: an audit at a Big Four firm is staffed by a team in which the senior person you met during the sales process is rarely the person reading your logs. I do the work I'm hired for. Third, timeline: four to six weeks, fixed fee. Not three months and an hourly bill that grows.
We had an architecture review done by another firm eighteen months ago. Why would we need another?
The methodology of this audit focuses specifically on compound state in deploy infrastructure — orphan containers, cache contention, environment variable scoping, the specific pathologies that produce the symptoms described in the article series. Most general architecture reviews don't go to this level of operational specificity. If your prior review covered this ground, send me the executive summary during the discovery call and we'll determine whether there's incremental value in re-engaging.
Can you do the implementation work after the audit?
Yes, but as a separate engagement. The audit price is fixed; implementation is hourly or retainer. Some clients prefer to keep these separate (independent diagnosis, internal execution). Others prefer the continuity of the same person doing both. Both work; the discovery call is the right place to decide.
Our company is smaller than the 15-engineer floor. Should I still reach out?
The 15-engineer floor is about engagement economics, not whether you have problems worth solving. If you're below that and your deploy infrastructure is genuinely producing the cost patterns described in these articles, get in touch — I may be able to refer you to a smaller-scope engagement format or a colleague who specializes in earlier-stage organizations.
How do you handle confidentiality?
NDA before the discovery call if you want one; mutual NDA standard before any engagement. The audit deliverables are yours and remain yours. I do not publish client-specific findings or use client logs in my writing. Patterns referenced in the article series are anonymized and synthesized across multiple engagements.

Want more context before booking? Read the article series →