Platform, SRE, and observability for teams that have outgrown their infrastructure.
We help cloud-native companies scale their platforms, fix the reliability problems that are costing them engineers, and finally see what their systems are doing. Hands-on work, scoped to an outcome.
Kubernetes, OpenTelemetry, Datadog, Grafana, PagerDuty. Fixed-scope assessments, implementation projects, and managed reliability.
- Mon 09:14"On-call is burning people out and we can't hire an SRE fast enough."SRE
- Tue 16:02"We're four Kubernetes versions behind and nobody wants to touch the upgrade."Platform
- Wed 11:40"The Datadog bill doubled and we still can't tell why checkout is slow."O11y
- Thu 08:55"Every deploy is a coin flip. We need a real platform, not a pile of Helm charts."Platform
- Fri 14:21"Same incident, third time this month. Why hasn't this been automated?"SRE
Three disciplines, one operating model.
Platform, reliability, and observability are usually three teams' problems and one person's pager. We work across all three because the fixes rarely stay in one lane.
A platform your engineers can ship on without asking.
Kubernetes done properly, with the paved roads and guardrails that let product teams deploy safely and often.
- Kubernetes architecture, upgrades, and multi-cluster
- GitOps, CI/CD, and progressive delivery
- Internal developer platform and golden paths
- Infrastructure as code and environment parity
- Autoscaling, capacity, and cost-aware scheduling
Fewer incidents, shorter ones, and none that repeat.
Reliability as an engineering practice: measured with SLOs, run through a humane on-call, and automated wherever a human is doing the same thing twice.
- SLOs, error budgets, and reliability reviews
- Incident response, postmortems, and on-call design
- Runbook and remediation automation
- Agent-assisted triage and incident handling
- Resilience testing and capacity planning
See what your systems are doing, at a bill you can defend.
Telemetry that answers questions during an incident instead of after it, on open standards so the vendor is a choice rather than a dependency.
- OpenTelemetry adoption and instrumentation
- Datadog, Grafana, and New Relic architecture
- Metrics cardinality and spend control
- Alerting that maps to SLOs, not thresholds
- Tracing for distributed and async systems
The reliability and incident audit.
A three-week, fixed-price review of your last 90 days of incidents, alert noise, on-call load, and observability posture. Every incident is classified by what automation could have done with it, and you leave with a prioritized roadmap.
It's the fastest way to find out where your reliability problems actually live, and the fee is credited against any work that follows.
- Duration3 weeks
- AccessRead-only
- Your team's timeAbout 4 hours
- PricingFixed fee
Three ways to engage, each scoped to an outcome.
No hourly staff augmentation. Every engagement has a defined result, a defined end, and a written handover so your team owns what we built.
Fixed-scope assessment
A short diagnostic of one area: incidents, platform, or observability. You get findings, numbers, and a prioritized roadmap your own team can execute.
Best when you know something is wrong and need to know what to fix first, or when you need evidence before committing budget.
Scoped project
We do the work: a Kubernetes upgrade, an OpenTelemetry rollout, an observability cost reset, an on-call redesign, a GitOps migration. Fixed scope, fixed timeline, documented handover.
Best when the roadmap is clear and the team doesn't have the hands or the specific experience to execute it.
See contract engineeringManaged reliability
An ongoing retainer where we own reliability outcomes for your platform. Alert hygiene, incident follow-through, and automation that takes recurring incidents off the pager, with agents doing more of the delivery over time.
Best when you're hiring for SRE or platform and need coverage now, or when you'd rather buy outcomes than headcount.
Cloud-native teams at the point where infrastructure becomes the bottleneck.
Typically Kubernetes-based SaaS companies between 50 and 500 people, Series A through C, with a VP of Engineering, CTO, or Head of Platform who owns the problem. These are the signals that usually mean it's time to talk.
- You have open SRE, DevOps, or platform roles and the work can't wait for the hire.
- A recent public incident, or a status page that has had a rough quarter.
- Growth is outrunning the platform: deploys are slow, environments drift, scaling is manual.
- Observability spend is climbing faster than revenue and nobody can say what it buys.
- A fresh raise with an infrastructure roadmap attached, and a board that expects it delivered.
- On-call load is showing up in attrition conversations.
Practitioners, not a bench.
Cactus Matrix is led by Mike, a Director of SRE who has spent his career running Kubernetes platforms at scale, standardizing observability on OpenTelemetry, and building the incident automation that turns recurring pages into closed tickets.
The methods we bring to clients are the ones we run on our own platforms, including the agent workflows that handle triage and remediation so humans aren't doing the same fix twice. You work directly with the people doing the engineering.
Tell us what's breaking, or what's about to.
A 30-minute call covers your stack, what's hurting, and whether we're the right people to fix it. If we're not, we'll say so and point you somewhere useful.