Reliability, engineered at hyperscale.
Ashfield builds the software that operates large compute estates — and helps the teams running them stand up the SRE practice that keeps those estates reliable.
Get in touch- SRE implementation
- Observability & telemetry
- Incident response
- Hyperscale compute
- Failure-domain design
- Release & rollout automation
- Risk & capacity modeling
Two ways we work with you
Software engineering
We build the systems large compute estates are actually operated through: monitoring and alerting that reaches the whole estate rather than one silo per team, incident tooling that assembles context before a human reaches the keyboard, postmortem and design-review workflows, release and rollout control, and the turn-up automation that shortens the path from hardware delivered to production-ready.
Increasingly that means agentic systems — built so their reasoning is inspectable, their permissions bounded, and their actions reversible.
Building an SRE practice
We help organizations establish an SRE function from scratch, or reshape one that has outgrown its original design: team shape and hiring, on-call and escalation, SLOs and error budgets, incident command, and the postmortem discipline that turns each outage into a durable change.
The measure of success is that operational headcount grows far more slowly than the fleet it supports — a small number of strong engineers doing engineering, not a large number absorbing toil.
How we think about scale and reliability
Scale is a design constraint, not an afterthought.
A system that works at moderate load and is later “scaled up” usually carries assumptions that don't hold at ten times the traffic, let alone a hundred. We design for the target scale from the start.
Design for failure, not just for load.
A capacity plan answers how much a system can carry. Failure-domain design answers what happens — and to whom — when part of it stops carrying anything at all.
Measure what the system does, not what it's supposed to do.
Dashboards built from intent drift from what's actually running. We build observability from the scheduler and the wire, not the architecture diagram.
Time to repair starts before anyone reaches the keyboard.
By the time a human is paged, the context should already be waiting: what changed, what else is alarming, who is affected, and which causes are plausible. Assembling that is largely mechanical work, and every minute of it done by hand is a minute of the outage.
Machine learning is now both the workload and the tooling.
It arrives twice. As a workload it looks nothing like general-purpose compute — accelerator fleets with their own power, thermal and failure-domain behavior, and a topology that has to be designed deliberately rather than inherited. As tooling it has moved into operations proper: Google's own SRE organization now runs agents that enrich alerts, form first hypotheses from logs, metrics and traces, and draft postmortems. Both halves are engineering problems. And an agent permitted to touch production needs bounded permissions, reasoning you can inspect afterwards, and a deterministic way back — autonomy granted on evidence, not assumed at the outset.
Operate what you build.
Advice that has never been run against a live on-call rotation is theory. We stay close to operations, not only to architecture.
“You cannot operate what you cannot see. Instrumentation is part of the system, not an accessory to it.”
Why Ashfield
Ashfield takes its name from Fraxinus, the ash tree: a species valued for timber that bends under load rather than breaking, and for a root system that spreads wide before it spreads deep. That's the property we design for — in software, in infrastructure, and in the teams that operate both: capacity to absorb stress without failure.
We work as engineers and as independent advisors, alongside teams operating at hyperscale — accelerator and general-purpose compute estates, the platforms built on them, and the operational functions that keep both running.
Get in touch
For engineering and advisory engagements, reach us directly — there's no form to fill in.
Now taking on a small number of engagements# reach us directly company: Ashfield Technology GmbH email: hello@ashfield.ch location: Zurich, Switzerland