JEPSEN

Consulting

In addition to analysis and teaching work, Jepsen offers flexible weekly consulting on distributed systems safety, documentation and design review, modeling, and more. Some clients engage Jepsen for private analyses—for instance, verifying the correctness of an in-house database system. To get started, email aphyr@jepsen.io.

Design

Clients often engage Jepsen during the initial design and prototyping phase for a new distributed system. Jepsen can review and write design documents, formalize invariants, build models, and talk through the design with your team. Drawing on broad expertise in distributed systems and concurrency safety, Jepsen can suggest appropriate consistency and availability properties, highlight relevant algorithms, and build models of your system for experimental analysis.

Documentation

Jepsen can review internal and public documentation to catch mistakes and clearly explain your system to its users. Or Jepsen can write docs from scratch; meeting with your system engineers. Clients rely on Jepsen for clear communication of safety properties.

Private Analysis

Some clients aren’t ready for a public Jepsen analysis. Perhaps the system you’d like to test is internal, or in early development. You can hire Jepsen to review documentation, build a test suite, and discuss interesting behaviors with your team privately.

Maintenance

Jepsen can review, run, and extend existing test suites, ensuring that they test the properties and failure modes you care about. Or you can ask Jepsen to add new features to the core Jepsen testing libraries.

Custom Work

Have an unusual request? Ask away. Jepsens’ offered internal conference talks, custom training sessions, and on-site meetings with a broad array of distributed systems teams. Fly.io worked with Jepsen to develop the Gossip Glomers series of distributed systems exercises, as an educational and recruiting tool.

Rates & Scheduling

Jepsen works with a single client, full time, on a week-to-week basis. Clients pay a flat rate for each week, and can keep going as long as they like. Once the engagement concludes, Jepsen moves on to the next client. Clients are queued on a first-signed, first-served basis.

Jepsen generally works year-round, Monday through Friday, 08:00 and 18:00 US Central time. Whenever Jepsen cannot provide a full week of work (e.g. due to teaching, conferences, holiday, or illness), that week’s fee is prorated accordingly.

If a client is at the top of the queue, but not ready to begin, they can opt to defer their engagement. Jepsen moves on to the next client in queue, and returns to the deferred client afterwards. There is no penalty for deferring.

Request Consulting

Want to get started? Email aphyr@jepsen.io.