Wrong pieces early.
Unwinnable endgame.

The problem

Most infrastructure failures are not implementation bugs — they are design decisions that were never questioned and whose rationale was never captured in a usable knowledge base. A proprietary stack chosen because it was familiar. A topology that looked fine at ten nodes and collapsed at ten thousand. A "temporary" single-tenant deployment that became permanent. By the time the pain shows up, the architecture is load-bearing in every sense. Like a buried gap in tetris, it cannot be un-placed — only played around, at rising cost, until the stack tops out. Fixing it costs multiples of getting it right.

We start engagements as a partner, not a vendor: embedded at the design stage, because that is where the leverage is. A week of honest architecture work — informed technology selection grounded in your actual load, TCO modeled against real numbers, failure domains mapped before they become incidents, and every decision recorded in your knowledge base — saves months of remediation and prevents the risks that turn into outages.

What we do

We produce architecture that your engineering team can actually build, operate, and improve — not slide decks for steering committees. The work is concrete: component diagrams with named technologies, data-flow with real protocols, capacity numbers tied to your traffic, a cost model that survives a finance review, and a decision log that enriches your knowledge base. We design using best practices and then transfer the workflow, so the architecture outlives any one person or engagement.

• System architecture. Topology, component boundaries, data flow, failure domains. We design for the failure modes you will actually hit, not the ones that look good in a diagram. Every trade-off is captured as an architecture decision record in your knowledge base, so your team can reason about it later without re-deriving the answer.
• Technology selection. Informed, open-source-first, but not dogmatic. We pick proprietary where it earns its place and open source everywhere else — and we show the math. Your team is involved in the analysis, not just presented the result.
• Open-source vs. proprietary analysis. Side-by-side comparison on capability, operational burden, lock-in cost, and three-year TCO using informed selection methodology. No vendor decks, no body-shop pitch.
• TCO modeling. Real numbers: compute, storage, egress, licensing, and the labor cost of operating each option. We have yet to see a proprietary stack that wins this comparison honestly.
• Scalability planning. Where the next bottleneck lives, what breaks at 10x, and what it costs to get there. We document the scaling path in your knowledge base before you need it, not after — proactive incident prevention built into the design.

This is not a corner-cutting stack. It is Proxmox VE for virtualization, Zabbix and Graylog for observability, Wazuh for security, Proxmox Backup Server for backups, and Gitea Actions for CI/CD — all open source, and all documented in your knowledge base so your team can operate them. Codyssey retains accountability for the architecture and the hard calls.

Deliverables

• Architecture document — topology, components, data flow, failure domains, named technology choices, and the best-practice rationale behind each
• Technology recommendation report — informed open-source vs. proprietary analysis with selection rationale and risk trade-offs
• Three-year TCO projection — compute, storage, egress, licensing, and operational labor, line-itemed
• Scalability plan — current capacity, identified bottlenecks, scaling path to 10x with cost per stage and proactive risk mitigations
• Migration and knowledge-transfer roadmap — phased plan with rollback points and enablement sessions so your team owns each transition
• Risk register and customer knowledge-base package — decisions that could go wrong, what to watch for, contingencies, and architecture decision records your team can maintain

Tech we use

Open-source-first does not mean open-source-only. Cloudflare sits in front of most of our deployments because its edge and DNS earn the line item. The principle is that every proprietary component has to justify itself against a mature open-source alternative on capability, cost, and transferability to your team — and most don't.

Related case study

A mid-size company migrated from VMware to Proxmox VE — zero data loss, zero downtime, completed in 6 weeks. Read the case study →

Next stage

Design is only useful if someone builds it. We carry the architecture straight into implementation — the same principal who drew the topology writes the OpenTofu modules alongside your team, capturing every decision in your knowledge base as we go. Development & Implementation →

Common questions