When your vendor can't fix it and hiring an SRE isn't worth it — that's the gap I work in.
By day I run production distributed systems; on the side I take on a few clients through NextDevOps when the problem is interesting and the team is sharp.
Fractional platform engineering for teams that can't afford downtime.
NextDevOps is a one-person consultancy focused on production data platforms and Kubernetes operations. Engagements are short, scoped, and async-friendly — typically a few hours a week over a defined period, or a fixed-scope project with a clear deliverable.
A financial-institution client had a recurring technical issue sitting adjacent to our product — not in it. The vendor–customer dynamic kept cycling the same ticket. We broke the cycle.
Read the full storyNews and updates from NextDevOps.
Post-migration validation (row counts, row fingerprints, and a row-level diff that names what's different), fixes for several bugs that reported success while losing data, Prometheus metrics, every PostgreSQL schema by default, and the compatibility matrix up to 53/53.
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Bulk-copy now works on every target adapter (not just Postgres), zero-to-real unit test coverage across all three adapters, two CI pipeline bugs fixed, and the compatibility matrix is up to 45/45 — with an honest look at what still isn't covered.
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Preflight now shows database info before you migrate, support-bundle packages diagnostics for troubleshooting, MySQL DSN/type-mapping bugs are fixed — and here's exactly what "27/27 passing" actually tests.
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I just shipped v0.4.0 of [XferDB](https://github.com/bchan77/XferDB), and this is the release I've been waiting on: **MongoDB 8.
Read MoreA universal database transfer tool. No vendor lock-in. Postgres ↔ Yugabyte, both directions. Now with MySQL and SQLite support too.
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I spent a week at Toronto and one day at Niagara. This time is somewhat different. I actually tried to unplug from the computer.
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Or, how I learned to stop worrying and love spinning up another cluster.
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A vendor support engineer will tell you what an error means. A consultant tells you what to do about it for your business. Those are not the same job.
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A real story about a financial client, a customer escalation, and the gap no support contract can close.
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A personal journey from skeptical developer to AI advocate.
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A technical deep-dive into how I use OpenClaw to manage Kubernetes, Jenkins, and more - all from Telegram.
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We are excited to announce the launch of NextDevOps, bringing over 20 years of enterprise IT expertise.
Read MoreHave a question? Send us an email.
Massachusetts, USA
billy@nextdevops.io
