Reliability engineering for Kubernetes, Istio, and AWS
RTZ Labs is a Site Reliability Engineering and platform reliability consultancy. We help engineering teams running Kubernetes, Istio, Envoy, and AWS reduce production incidents and scale safely – without the cost of building a full Platform Engineering team.
Infrastructure shouldn’t slow down your product
Developers should be building product – not spending their week debugging Kubernetes, fixing pipelines, or fighting cloud infrastructure. We work alongside engineering teams to improve reliability, scalability, and developer productivity.
Three ways we work with your team
Focused on outcomes – fewer incidents, safer scaling, and infrastructure your developers can build on.
Deep expertise in a narrow stack
We work in a small number of technologies and go deep in them, rather than covering everything shallowly.
Istio
Istio problems rarely announce themselves as Istio problems.
Envoy & service mesh
Envoy is the component actually carrying your traffic, whether you configure it directly or through a mesh control plane.
Kubernetes
A Kubernetes cluster that worked at one scale often stops working at the next, and the reasons are usually structural: resource requests that were guessed once and never revisited, disruption budgets that block node rotation, autoscaling that reacts to the wrong signal, or upgrade debt that has compounded.
AWS
Most AWS reliability problems are architectural rather than operational: a workload spread across availability zones that still shares a single point of failure, service quotas nobody tracked until they were hit, or a network path whose cost and latency both grow with traffic.
API Gateway
The gateway is where every request enters, which makes it both the highest-leverage place to enforce policy and the easiest place to build a bottleneck.
Observability
Most teams are not short of telemetry; they are short of signal.
Start with an Infrastructure Reliability Assessment
In 1–2 weeks, we’ll review your cloud platform and identify the reliability, scalability, and operational risks that could become your next production problem.
Senior engineers who have run infrastructure at scale
Our engineers have operated infrastructure supporting large-scale production environments and billions of requests. RTZ Labs is a small, senior team – deep infrastructure expertise and direct access to the people doing the work, without the overhead of a large consultancy.
This describes our engineers’ professional background. For work delivered by RTZ Labs, see our case studies.
The kind of work we do
Anonymized engagements showing how we help teams stabilize and scale their infrastructure.
Stabilizing a Kubernetes platform under growing load
A product team on EKS whose cluster had become hard to operate as usage grew – turning incident noise into a platform the team could trust.
- Reduced day-to-day infrastructure operations for the product team
- More consistent, lower-risk deployments
- Clearer signal in alerting, so real incidents surface faster
Bringing an organically-grown AWS estate into code
An engineering team whose AWS footprint had outgrown manual operation – made reproducible, safer to change, and ready to scale.
- Reproducible infrastructure defined in code rather than tribal knowledge
- Faster, safer environment changes
- Automated backups and clearer recovery posture
Deep infrastructure expertise
The tools are how we deliver outcomes – not the product. We use the stack that growing product teams actually run in production.
FAQs
Common questions from CTOs, founders, and engineering leaders.
RTZ Labs at a glance
- What we are
- A specialized Site Reliability Engineering and platform reliability consultancy.
- Who we help
- Technology startups and growing software companies, roughly 10–100 engineers, running production workloads on Kubernetes and AWS.
- Technologies
- Kubernetes, Amazon EKS, Istio, Envoy, service mesh, API gateway architecture, AWS networking and reliability, Terraform, CI/CD and GitOps, Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, OpenTelemetry.
- Services
- Production Reliability, Cloud Platform Engineering, Fractional SRE and fractional staff engineering, plus a fixed-scope Infrastructure Reliability Assessment.
- Engagement models
- Remote-first. Engagements run as fixed-scope projects or monthly retainers.
- Where we work
- Remote-first, working with engineering teams across the United States and Canada.
- How to get in touch
- Email contact@rtzlabs.io or use the contact form to book an Infrastructure Reliability Assessment.
When your infrastructure starts becoming a problem, talk to us
Book an infrastructure review and we’ll help you find the risks before production does.