Engineering That Has
Been in the Trenches
Astral Forge is built on one conviction: infrastructure should be understood, owned and designed with intent by the organisation that runs it.
More than two decades of direct experience across the full infrastructure spectrum, from dedicated bare metal clusters to large distributed systems handling millions of requests per day.
We have led on call rotations, written incident reviews for production outages, designed CI/CD pipelines from scratch, migrated legacy databases without downtime, and hardened systems against real attacks, as the engineers at the keyboard.
What we see, repeatedly, is organisations paying large sums for solutions that are overengineered, poorly understood and impossible to debug when they fail. The antidote is more intent: every component earns its place, every abstraction is justified and every system is documented for the people who will maintain it.
That philosophy is the foundation of Astral Forge. The name is intentional: a forge is where raw materials are shaped under pressure into something precise and durable. The "Astral" part is the ambition: systems built here should be capable of scaling to any altitude you set.
Designed and operated observability platforms, on call systems, and reliability programmes for production workloads.
Kubernetes at scale, infrastructure as code, GitOps workflows and developer platform engineering across self managed and sovereign environments.
Zero trust design, infrastructure hardening, GDPR implementation, secret management and incident response.
HA PostgreSQL and MySQL clusters, performance tuning, and zero downtime migrations for critical systems.
How We Work
First Principles Thinking
Every architecture decision starts from your actual requirements rather than from the default stack of the moment.
Documentation is Not Optional
Every system we build includes runbooks, architecture diagrams and operational guides. You should be able to operate it without us.
You Own Everything
Keys, credentials, repositories and infrastructure state. You have full access from the first day.
Quality Over Quantity
We take on fewer engagements and design each one for where your organisation is and where it is going. No scope maximisation.
Security by Default
Least privilege, encrypted by default, auditable everywhere. Security is in the design from the start.
Honest Communication
We will tell you when something is not ready, when a cheaper approach exists, and when your idea has risks. Always.
The Tool Belt
We work across a wide range of tooling and choose the tool for the problem rather than for the trend.
- Kubernetes / K3s
- Terraform / OpenTofu
- Ansible
- Proxmox / VMware
- Cilium / Calico
- Prometheus / VictoriaMetrics
- Grafana / Loki / Tempo
- OpenTelemetry
- Alertmanager
- eBPF tooling
- PostgreSQL / Patroni
- MySQL / Percona
- Redis / Valkey
- ClickHouse
- MongoDB
- Go
- Python
- Bash / Shell
- TypeScript
- Rust
# not exhaustive, we adapt to the stack you already run
# commercial platforms integrated case by case, against your sovereignty and compliance requirements
Want to work together?
Tell us about your infrastructure, what is getting in the way and where you want to take it. We will tell you honestly whether and how we can help.