Architecture review
A focused look at your Azure architecture, pipelines, monitoring and costs, with a written view of the risks and a prioritised set of recommendations.
Technology Consultancy
Azure architecture, platform engineering, reliability and AI-assisted delivery for teams building cloud-native, distributed systems — delivered directly by Adam White.
What we offer
Birchfield Solutions is a focused practice, not a large consultancy. Every engagement is led personally by Adam White, a Principal Software Engineer and Azure solution architect with over 14 years across C#/.NET development, architectural design, distributed cloud applications, and stakeholder and team leadership. You work directly with the person doing the engineering, without layers of account management.
The services below are drawn from real engagements. For examples, see our case studies.
Azure cloud architecture & landing zones
Designing Azure platforms that are highly available, resilient and cost-effective, and that the business can understand.
- Landing zone foundations: subscription vending and hub-and-spoke networking for consistent, secure environments
- Solution and application architecture: event-driven, queue-based and message-driven systems, microservices, modular monoliths and containerised designs
- Domain-driven design, clean architecture and CQRS where they fit the problem
- Applying Azure reference architectures to resolve architectural and performance constraints
- FinOps reviews of Azure subscriptions to find savings
- Architecture documentation, policy and presentations to Architectural Review Boards
For a packaged Azure foundation, see Heartwood, our Azure landing zone.
Tools: AKS, Azure Functions and Durable Functions, App Service, APIM, Service Bus, Event Grid, Event Hubs, Cosmos DB, Azure SQL, Data Lake and Blob Storage, Key Vault, Entra ID, Azure Defender for Storage.
Platform engineering, DevOps & infrastructure as code
Getting code and infrastructure from commit to production repeatably, in every environment.
- Introducing CI/CD where releases are still manual, and the culture change that goes with it
- Modular, repeatable Terraform and Bicep that deploys across multiple subscriptions per environment
- YAML pipelines that separate infrastructure and code builds and deployments
- Testing infrastructure code as well as application code
- Managed build agents and microenvironments to reduce build friction
- Source control migrations, including GitHub Enterprise to GitHub EMU
Tools: Terraform, Terratest, Bicep, ARM templates, Helm, Azure DevOps, GitHub Actions, Jenkins, TeamCity, Docker, PowerShell, Azure CLI.
AI-assisted & hyper-velocity engineering
Hyper-velocity engineering uses AI tools to take the slow, repetitive work out of delivery, while tests, reviews, pipelines and monitoring still decide what ships. We help teams adopt it in a way that fits their codebase and their controls.
- Accelerated code navigation for engineers working in large or unfamiliar codebases
- AI-assisted test generation
- Incident triage support to reduce time-to-fix
- Code review support, troubleshooting and automation helpers
- Agentic AI, RAG and AI-assisted delivery pipelines
Adam established AI-assisted engineering practices at Microsoft (code navigation, test generation and incident triage) that improved team throughput and reduced time-to-fix, and introduced AI-assisted tooling at Stonewater (code review support, troubleshooting and automation helpers) to reduce cycle time and increase delivery throughput.
SRE, performance & reliability
Making sure a system meets its SLA under real load, and that you can see when it does not.
- Load and capacity testing to find contention, performance issues and race conditions
- Monitoring that captures metrics meaningful to the service and its customers
- Architectural fixes for throughput: queue sharding, distributed caching, partition key design
- Query and execution plan analysis for C#/.NET and SQL/EF performance
- Disaster recovery planning and post-mortems in a no-blame culture
- Chaos engineering, as a Gremlin Certified Chaos Engineering Practitioner
Tools: k6, JMeter, Playwright, App Insights, Log Analytics, Azure Database Watcher, Azure Cache for Redis.
Technical leadership & delivery turnaround
Leading the people as well as the code, especially where a project has lost its way.
- Leading teams of up to 25 engineers, and supporting other team leads
- Acting as Technical Product Owner, setting the roadmap with product and programme leadership
- Turning around struggling projects and teams into reliable delivery
- Requirements gathering and stakeholder management with technical and non-technical people
- Mentoring engineers, and running Azure bootcamps for new graduate hires
- Agile delivery with Scrum and Kanban, TDD and BDD
Hands-on C#/.NET engineering
Behind all of the above is hands-on software engineering: back-end and full-stack C#/.NET, RESTful APIs, GraphQL, and front ends in Angular, React and TypeScript, built to SOLID principles and covered by tests. Birchfield Solutions also builds its own Android and iOS apps and original games.
Ways to engage
Hands-on delivery
Embedded in your team to design and build: platform work, infrastructure as code, pipelines, services and performance fixes.
Team leadership
Leading or re-forming a delivery team, as lead engineer or Technical Product Owner, with clear outcomes and a sustainable way of working.
Interim lead engineer
Covering a lead or principal engineering role while you recruit, with a proper handover when the permanent hire starts.
Training
Workshops, bootcamps and coaching in AI-assisted engineering, TDD, clean code, architecture, Azure and more. See the courses.
For the organisations Adam has worked with, see the About page. If you want specifics relevant to your context, email us and we can discuss what is appropriate to share.