Architecture consulting for complex system landscapes
Solution architecture: modernize and build without chaos
You've got a system landscape that grew over years - some parts overengineered, some held together by convention and tribal knowledge, some nobody wants to touch. We map what's actually load-bearing versus accidental, figure out where the real constraints are (not only the assumed ones), and lay out target options with trade-offs spelled out. No 'just rewrite it' hand-waving.
Integration architecture: APIs and events that don't rot
Forty services, a handful of vendor platforms, a few event buses, and that one SFTP integration everyone routes around. We design integration approaches that hold up when teams change, vendors update, and requirements shift - covering API contracts, async flows, error handling, and the boring-but-critical stuff like schema evolution and retry semantics.
Technical governance: consistency without the bottleneck
Architecture decisions shouldn't live in someone's head or a Slack thread from six months ago. We set up lightweight decision records, review routines, and guardrails that keep things consistent without turning into a committee. The goal is that any engineer can find why something was decided, not only what.
Architecture principles
- Pragmatic over dogma
- Make trade-offs explicit
- Prefer boring tech where it wins
- Challenge inherited assumptions; keep the ones that earn it
- If it can't be operated, it's not done
- Defaults should be secure; exceptions should be documented
- No buzzword soups or 70-page design documents; only traceable, actionable choices
How we work
Discovery (typically 1-2 weeks): before committing to a full engagement, we confirm scope, access, risks, and deliverables. Enough to know if there's a real problem and whether we're the right fit.
Scoped review (typically 3-6 weeks): a bounded engagement with a clear output - current state assessment, target architecture options, and a roadmap. Good for teams that need a second opinion or a starting point before committing to larger changes.
Embedded (retainer): we become part of your architecture function. Ongoing architecture decisions, integration guidance, governance, vendor design reviews, and availability for the questions that don't fit neatly into a ticket.
Architecture deliverables
We start with a current-state map - system boundaries, ownership lines, dependency chains, and the constraints nobody wrote down. From there, architecture decision records with enough context that an engineer joining in six months can understand the reasoning without asking around. Integration designs that go past the happy-path diagram - failure modes, edge cases, and what happens when the upstream vendor pushes a breaking change on a Friday. When a vendor hands you a "solution architecture," we review it against your actual landscape before it becomes your operational problem.
For embedded engagements, you also get a standing escalation path for the issues that cross system boundaries and where no team has clear responsibility. Living reference patterns and guardrails - ADR templates, integration contracts, runbook scaffolds - that teams can actually use without asking permission. Reliability targets you can alert on. And a phased roadmap that's honest about what blocks what.
Everything lives in your tools - Confluence, OneDrive, Jira, Git - written for the engineers who'll maintain it, not for a steering committee.
About Vibe Solutions
Hands-on production experience with Azure, Kubernetes, Terraform, and containerized microservice architectures. Focused on integration-heavy landscapes where custom applications, vendor platforms, cloud infrastructure, and legacy systems need to work together reliably.
Registered in Latvia (EU). Async-first, with flexibility for time zone overlap globally.
Founder and principal architect: Valters Jansons - a decade in cloud platform operations and integration architecture across IT distribution and retail. Certified Azure Solutions Architect Expert and DevOps Engineer Expert.
Get in touch
Let us know what you are building and what hurts at hello@vibesolutions.eu or on LinkedIn and we'll see if there's a fit.