Services / Linux fleet
Principal-led, fractional
Linux fleet reliability & modernization
Most Linux fleets aren’t managed, they’re kept alive: patched late, monitored in fragments, held together in one person’s head. We run them to a defined standard: patched, watched, and recoverable.
A fixed-scope read of where your fleet stands, typically one to two weeks.
No ticket queue. Senior and principal-led, and the practice built to keep your fleet dependable is the one that modernizes it, at your pace.
Why fleets slip
Whatever you run, whether RHEL on the important boxes, Ubuntu where a team moved fast, or one distribution across the whole estate, the signs are the same: a patch cadence that slips a quarter, a kernel update left too long because touching it means touching everything, monitoring that covers whatever was urgent the day it was set up, and a backup no one has restored. Run to a standard, and a fleet stops being a pile of exceptions and becomes a system you can reason about; in regulated sectors, running to a documented standard is expected.
We hold that standard across the RHEL family (RHEL, Rocky, Alma), Debian, and Ubuntu, on bare metal or as virtual machines, on-premises or in your cloud.
What we run
Day to day, managing the fleet means the operational work it actually needs, done with automation and to a standard:
- Patching and updates. Regular patch cycles and emergency fixes for the ones that can’t wait, rolled out in waves, starting with a low-risk subset. Where your estate pins its package sets, or that gets scoped in, every wave installs the versions the subset was tested on.
- Monitoring and alerting. Metrics, logs, and alerting so the fleet is watched by design, on the stack you already run or one we stand up.
- Backup, DR, and recovery. Backups we test-restore on a defined schedule, with recovery objectives agreed up front rather than discovered during an incident.
- Security hardening. A hardening baseline, least-privilege access, and configuration that holds up over time.
- Configuration and automation. The fleet defined as code in Ansible, so every change is designed to be repeatable and land consistently across the fleet, with kernel tuning and out-of-band (IPMI/BMC) management where it counts.
The standard itself is concrete and set per engagement: patch and update cadence, monitoring coverage, recovery objectives (RTO and RPO), and a hardening baseline, written into the SOW.
How we engage
Fractional and principal-led. A principal engineer owns the standard and is accountable for the work, with senior specialists brought in as the work requires, and response is set per engagement to fit how your fleet runs, rather than a blanket tier you pay for and rarely use.
Three ways in. We run the fleet to the standard on a fractional retainer. Or your team runs it and we take the escalations: they own the day to day and open a ticket when something is beyond them. Or we bring it up to the standard as a fixed-scope project and hand it back, with the runbooks and automation to keep it there scoped into the work. Whichever it is, the cleanest first step is a short fleet assessment, and pricing is set per engagement, against the scope.
We work inside your access controls and change process, with least-privilege credentials and an auditable trail, so your security team sets the boundaries and we operate within them. Onboarding starts with access and an inventory before anything touches production. And there is no contractual lock-in: leave a retainer on notice, or finish a project and keep everything it produced.
Why this practice
You are not buying a ticket queue. The work is led by a principal engineer, Red Hat Certified (RHCE and RHCSA), working across production infrastructure since the end of the 2000s, from bare metal and the Linux estate through distributed storage and Kubernetes. That breadth is why fleet decisions account for the storage, networking, and platform underneath the OS, not just the box in front of you.
When you’re ready to modernize
When the fleet is solid, the same practice takes it forward, at your pace and not as a rip-and-replace: onto a Kubernetes platform, or off a traditional hypervisor with our VMware exit.
Which Linux distributions do you cover?
RHEL, Rocky, Alma, Debian, and Ubuntu, on bare metal or VMs, on-premises or in your cloud.
We are still running CentOS. Can you help?
Yes, and which CentOS matters. CentOS Linux 7 and 8 are past end of life, so those move onto a supported RHEL-family distribution as part of the work. Stream 9 and 10 are still supported upstream, but Stream tracks ahead of RHEL rather than behind it, which makes it the wrong base for anything that needs a fixed target.
Do you run the fleet, or set it up and hand it back?
Any of three. Run it for you on a fractional retainer; take the escalations by ticket while your team runs it; or bring it to the standard as a fixed-scope project and hand it back, with the runbooks and automation to keep it there scoped into the work.
Are you a 24/7 NOC?
No. Fractional and principal-led, with cover set per engagement rather than sold as a standing tier.
Is there any lock-in?
No contractual lock-in. Leave a retainer on notice, or finish a project and keep everything it produced.
Want to know where your fleet actually stands?
Start with a fleet assessment: a fixed-scope read of your patching, monitoring coverage, backup and recovery readiness, and hardening, delivered as a report and a prioritized plan. Typically one to two weeks. Tell us what you are running.