Full life cycle
Plan it, build it, launch it.
Then we keep it running.
A two-screen booking tool or the system your whole company runs on. One team from the first whiteboard to the fortieth patch, so nobody inherits code they’ve never seen.
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Foothills Digital—Sentrello Premier Partner
- AWS
- Azure
- Google Cloud
- DigitalOcean
- On-premises Linux
- On-premises Windows
Every one of our people holds active certifications on the platforms they work on.
Sentrello is our only partnership. On the clouds, it's our people who hold the certifications. We don't claim a partner tier, and we'll keep saying so until that changes.
Where this usually starts
The launch was never the expensive part
You’ve probably lived this one. Launch day goes fine. Eighteen months later, the thing that went fine is the thing keeping you up at night.
- The agency that built it moved on, and the handover was a zip file.
- Nobody on the payroll has ever deployed it on purpose.
- Dependencies sit two major versions behind. The tests were a line in the proposal.
- Changing a button label gets quoted as a project, because for them it is one.
- The cloud account is in their name, so leaving means starting over.
What we do instead
So one team carries it through all four stages
We plan it, build it, launch it and keep it running, and the people patching it in year three sat in the first meeting. It lives in your repository from the first commit, on your cloud account or your own Linux and Windows servers, in whatever stack suits the job. Want it built and handed over? Fine. Want us to stay and run it? Also fine. Either way the quote is written for your project, because there’s no package to pick from.
How it works
How a build actually goes
You’ll see running software in week three. Not a burndown chart in month six.
Find the hard edges
A week, sometimes two. What’s the budget, the deadline, the regulator, the integration that can’t break? We design around those, and everything else gets to stay simple.
Ship a vertical slice
One thin path through the whole system, live in your environment behind a flag. It proves the architecture, and it hands you something real to argue with.
Widen it, slice by slice
Every increment lands in a real environment. The money paths and permission boundaries get tested hard; the getters get left alone.
Launch on a rehearsed pipeline
By launch day the deployment has already run into staging dozens of times, and any release can be rolled back. Dull is what we’re aiming for.
Keep it running
Patches turn up as pull requests with the tests already green. We wrote the runbooks while we built it, so year two doesn’t open with archaeology.
Plan
Changing your mind is cheapest while it’s still a document.
The constraints come first
Budget, deadline, regulator, and the one integration that can’t go down. Pin those, and the rest of the design is allowed to be plain.
Success, in one sentence
What has to be true for this to have been worth building? We write it down and you sign off on it. Months later, it settles every argument about scope.
An architecture someone else could pick up
Written and diagrammed well enough that another firm could run with it. If it couldn’t pass that test, it wasn’t saying anything.
Year two, decided in week one
Who maintains it, on what, and on what terms. A product with no answer to that has an expiry date nobody mentioned.
Create
Working software early, in your account, under your name.
Vertical slices
Each increment reaches a real environment behind a flag, so by week three you’re clicking through something instead of reading about it.
Your repository from the first commit
Your organization, your history. Not a copy handed over at the end with the interesting parts squashed.
Any stack, any server
A small internal tool or an enterprise system, on AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, DigitalOcean or a box in your own building. We pick proven tools over shiny ones, since novelty is a bill that arrives at the worst possible hour.
Tests where they pay
Domain logic, money paths and permission boundaries get covered. Getters don’t.
Everything as code
Infrastructure, configuration and pipelines sit in version control beside the app. If the environment vanished tonight, we’d rebuild it from the repo.
Launch, then maintain
Most of a product’s life happens after the launch post.
A rehearsed deployment
The pipeline that puts it live has already pushed to staging dozens of times. Launch day should feel like any other Tuesday.
Reversible releases
Every change can go backwards. A release you can’t undo isn’t a release. It’s a bet.
Watched before the traffic arrives
Logs, traces and alerts ship with the first slice. Observability bolted on after the outage is just a post-mortem with graphs.
Patches as pull requests
Dependencies, runtimes and base images update through the same pipeline as features, and the tests have gone green before anyone looks.
Documented as we go
Runbooks, decision records and diagrams get written while it’s built. Nobody reconstructs them from memory on the way out the door.
Related
Sentrello
Sentrello is a self-hosted, source-available unified business management platform. We’re a Sentrello Premier Partner, and our own invoices, net terms and subscriptions all come out of it.
Platform Migration
Applications, infrastructure, the legacy system nobody dares switch off, and every CMS from WordPress to Joomla. However old it is and whatever it’s called, if your business runs on it, we can move it.
Compliance Management
We audit your setup against HIPAA, PCI-DSS, SOC 2 and ISO 27001, get you ready, and keep you there. The controls run all year and the evidence falls out of the running, so nobody spends audit week rebuilding twelve months from memory.
Tell us what it has to do
Not what it should be built in. That argument’s the easy one, and it comes later.
Send us the problem and the date it has to work by. You’ll get a straight answer on whether we’re the right people for it, and now and then that answer is no.
- What we arePlan, create, launch, maintain
- What we areSentrello Premier Partner
- What we areEvery quote written for you