The Granite Dog Systems Approach
Granite Dog Systems brings over 25+ years of experience to the IT and Systems engineering field. I started when 56k modems were the standard and have evolved alongside the industry ever since.
My career has spanned the whole technical spectrum: from rescuing “dead” servers at an IT solutions provider to integrating complex client/server software with Novell, Windows, Documentum, and Hummingbird.
I witnessed the birth of the cloud firsthand and led multiple infrastructure migrations. From traditional data centers to niche cloud providers, and finally to AWS. Most recently, I spent eight years in a very large pond, where I supported Tier Zero services and led the launch of new cloud products.
The words I always tell other engineers are that my goal is to “Automate myself out of a job.” While the sheer volume of work has made that goal impossible to reach fully, I remain a firm believer that automation and learning are the only paths to predictable scale and reliable results.
My consulting business is taking an approach of building packages for common platform types first to save customers time. We believe in understanding and testing platforms before building them for clients, and in using Infrastructure as Code (IaC).
Granite Dog Systems is all about: doing the research, breaking things, and fixing them properly before delivering a package you can manage once I am done. I’m figuring out the technical hurdles now so that when you’re ready to scale, the path is better defined.
If one of the packages I offer needs to be heavily customized, or if something new needs to be built, that can be handled as well.
How I Help You Scale
- Infrastructure Migrations & Modernization: Proven experience moving complex workloads from legacy data centers to private and public clouds (AWS/OCI) while reducing technical debt.
- Platform Engineering: Architecting and deploying resilient, Tier-Zero systems designed for high availability and enterprise-scale reliability.
- Automation & CI/CD Strategy: Eliminating manual toil and accelerating delivery cycles through Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and automated build pipelines.
- Legacy-to-Cloud Integration: Bridging the gap between specialized legacy software and modern cloud stacks to ensure business continuity during transitions.