Reliability Engineering
SLOs and SLIs that mean something, alerts worth waking up for, incident response, runbooks, and error budgets that fit the team.
Platform engineering · Reliability · Modernization
Platform reliability, engineered with steady hands.
Steady State Systems helps teams stabilize critical systems, modernize legacy platforms, and build cloud-native operating models that hold up under real production pressure.
Go slow to go fast
Platform Engineering
Site Reliability
Cloud Modernization
Operational Readiness
FinTech & Regulated Systems
Services
Control the complexity before it controls the system.
Critical systems rarely fail because of one bad deploy. They fail when complexity piles up faster than teams can see it, operate it, or safely change it.
Platform Engineering
Internal developer platforms, deployment workflows, CI/CD, GitOps, and infrastructure automation that make the safe path the easy one.
Cloud Modernization
AWS architecture, Kubernetes, database upgrades, migration planning, and scaling that keeps an eye on the bill.
Legacy Stabilization
Operational hardening, deterministic testing, strangler patterns, and safe replacement plans for the systems nobody wants to touch.
Technical Advisory
Fractional SRE and platform leadership, architecture reviews, risk assessments, and translation between engineering and the executive table.
Approach
Calm execution starts with a clear map.
Every engagement starts with the system as it actually runs: its dependencies, owners, failure modes, business constraints, and deploy realities. From there, improvements are practical, sequenced, and reversible.
- Map the system Surface dependencies, risks, ownership boundaries, and how things really operate today.
- Stabilize the path Improve observability, testing, deployment safety, and incident controls.
- Modernize deliberately Evolve the architecture without breaking the business that depends on it.
- Leave capability behind Documentation, runbooks, and patterns your team can keep improving on its own.
Then repeat, from steadier ground
About
Stability is not stagnation.
Steady State Systems is the consulting practice of Edward “Ted” McCormick, a platform reliability engineer and former U.S. Navy officer.
Ted’s work spans FinTech, cloud infrastructure, PCI-sensitive systems, Kubernetes platforms, and legacy modernization: the places where downtime is expensive and change has to be careful. Naval operations taught the same lesson production does: good systems are built to move, adapt, and recover without losing the plot.
The practice runs on a simple operating belief: critical systems deserve calm engineering, clear ownership, and careful change.
Contact
Have a system that needs to be steadier than it is today?
Let’s talk about where the risk is, what needs to change, and how to make the next move safely. A short email is plenty to start.