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Aleš Novák

Available for new projects

DevOps / SRE / Cloud Infrastructure

Infrastructure that stays boring - so your team ships fast.

I am Aleš, a freelance DevOps and SRE engineer. I build and run the cloud platforms that startups and growing teams depend on: automated, observable, and quiet at 3am. You ship features; the infrastructure just works.

Start a project How I work
01 12+ yrs in production
02 Remote / CET
03 AWS / GCP / Kubernetes

Tooling I run in production

Services

What I take off your plate

Six disciplines, one outcome: a platform your engineers trust and your finance team understands. Hire me for one, or all of them.

Track record

Reliability you can put a number on

The point of good infrastructure is that nothing happens. Here is what that looks like in practice across recent engagements.

System status All systems operational checking…
  • api-gateway healthy checking
  • postgres-primary healthy checking
  • k8s-ingress healthy checking
  • edge-cache healthy checking
  • prometheus healthy checking
99.98 %
Uptime maintained across managed platforms
< 120 ms
p99 API latency after tuning
45 min
Median time to recovery on incidents
40 %
Typical cloud spend cut in a cost audit
90-day uptime 99.98%

Figures are representative of recent engagements and depend on the stack involved.

How I work

Three ways to bring me in

Pick the engagement that fits where you are. Every one starts with a short call and a clear, written scope before any invoice.

Project

Fixed scope

A defined piece of work: a cloud migration, a Kubernetes platform, a CI/CD overhaul. Scoped and priced up front, delivered with documentation and a handover.

Best when you know what you need built.

Retainer

Ongoing

Your fractional SRE. A set number of days each month to run, improve and stay on call for your platform, so reliability has an owner without a full-time hire.

Best when you need a steady pair of hands.

Audit

1-2 weeks

A fixed-fee review of your infrastructure, cost and reliability. You get a written report, prioritised findings and a roadmap you can act on with or without me.

Best when you want clarity before committing.

  1. 01 Discovery call
  2. 02 Written scope
  3. 03 Build & iterate
  4. 04 Handover & docs
Aleš Novák, DevOps & SRE Consultant
Aleš Novák, DevOps & SRE Consultant Prague

About

Twelve years keeping systems online.

I have spent my career on the operations side of software: the pager, the migration, the 2am incident bridge. That taught me the same lesson every time. Reliable systems are not the ones with the cleverest architecture. They are the ones that are automated, observable, and documented well enough that the next person can fix them.

I work the way I would want a contractor to work with my own team: remote, async-friendly, and allergic to surprises. You get one engineer who owns the problem end to end, writes things down, and hands back something your team can run without me.

Based in the Czech Republic, working across European and US timezones. Available in English and Czech.

Certifications

  • AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Professional
  • Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA)
  • HashiCorp Terraform Associate

Selected work

A few outcomes

Anonymised to respect client confidentiality. Real references available on request.

  • 01

    Cut the AWS bill by 40%

    Right-sized a Series-A SaaS platform and moved steady workloads to committed-use, with no impact on performance.

    AWS / Terraform / Kubernetes

  • 02

    Zero-downtime move to Kubernetes

    Migrated a fintech off ageing VMs onto a hardened cluster with GitOps delivery and full audit logging.

    GKE / Argo CD / Prometheus

  • 03

    From weekly outages to 99.99%

    Introduced SLOs, real alerting and runbooks for an e-commerce team that was firefighting every week.

    GCP / Grafana / PagerDuty

Questions

Good to know

Do you work remotely?

Yes, by default. I am based in the Czech Republic (CET) and work async with teams across Europe and the US. On-site visits are possible for kickoffs when it helps.

What size of company do you work with?

From early-stage startups to teams of around 200. The common thread is that reliability has become too important to leave to chance and too small to justify a full-time SRE hire yet.

How do you charge?

Projects are scoped and priced up front. Retainers are a fixed number of days per month. Audits are a fixed fee. You always know the number before we start. Get in touch for current rates and availability.

Can you join our existing team?

Yes. I work inside your tooling, your repos and your standups, and I leave documentation behind so the work outlives the engagement.

Do you handle on-call?

Within a retainer, yes. I will also set up on-call properly for your team: rotations, escalation, and runbooks so the pager is survivable.

Which languages do you work in?

English and Czech, for both written work and calls.

Contact

Let us talk about your infrastructure

Tell me what you are building and where it hurts. A short message is enough to start; I will reply with next steps.

Prefer email?
hello@alesnovak.dev
Usually replies within one business day.
Prague · CET / UTC+1