Overview
Bad architecture doesn't announce itself, it shows up as slow deployments, cascading failures, engineers afraid to touch certain parts of the codebase, and features that take three times longer than they should. Elytic Labs helps organizations diagnose what's holding their systems back and design the architecture to move forward with confidence.
Elytic Labs brings a decade of experience designing systems across early-stage startups and enterprise environments — from greenfield builds to untangling decade-old monoliths. Every architecture recommendation is grounded in pragmatism: the right level of complexity for your team, your traffic, and your growth trajectory. Not a textbook diagram — a system your engineers can actually build and own.
What's included
- Architecture assessment & audit — deep review of your current system design, identifying bottlenecks, single points of failure, scalability ceilings, and technical debt hotspots
- Greenfield architecture design — service boundaries, data flow design, API contracts, and technology selection for new products or platforms
- Microservices & distributed systems design — decomposition strategies, inter-service communication patterns (REST, gRPC, event-driven), and service mesh evaluation
- Monolith modernization planning — strangler fig patterns, incremental decomposition roadmaps, and risk-mitigation strategies for live systems
- Event-driven architecture — message broker selection and design (Kafka, RabbitMQ, AWS SNS/SQS), event sourcing, and CQRS patterns
- Technology selection advisory — unbiased evaluation of frameworks, databases, messaging systems, and cloud services against your specific requirements
- Architecture documentation — decision records (ADRs), component diagrams, data flow maps, and runbooks delivered with every engagement
Technologies & patterns
REST · gRPC · GraphQL · Kafka · RabbitMQ · AWS SNS/SQS · PostgreSQL · Redis · Docker · Kubernetes · Terraform · Node.js · Python · FastAPI · Domain-Driven Design · CQRS · Event Sourcing · Microservices · Strangler Fig
Ideal for
- Engineering leaders who inherited a system and need an honest outside assessment before committing to a direction
- CTOs at scaling startups whose architecture made sense at 10 engineers but is breaking down at 50
- Product companies preparing for a significant increase in traffic, data volume, or team size
- Organizations planning a major platform rewrite who want to de-risk the approach before building
- Teams that have had recurring incidents and suspect the architecture — not the code — is the root cause
How engagements work
Systems architecture work typically begins with a two-week discovery sprint — reviewing existing systems, interviewing engineers, and mapping the current state — before any recommendations are made.This produces a written architecture assessment and proposed direction that the client owns outright, regardless of whether Elytic Labs continues into the build phase.