Andrew NikolskyIndependent IT consultant Let’s talk
Independent IT consultant

Complex systems.
Clear decisions.

I help technology leaders turn infrastructure risks, delivery bottlenecks and technical debt into a practical plan forward.

Let’s discuss your challenge Explore my expertise
Based in Yerevan, Armenia
Portrait of Andrew Nikolsky
COLORFOR / IT ADVISORY
Engineering depth. A business perspective.
Engineering since 2006From building products to leading platforms
900+ virtual machinesInfrastructure operations experience
100+ test environmentsHybrid platforms across VMs and Kubernetes

01 / HOW I CAN HELP

An outside perspective.
Hands-on expertise.

For founders, CTOs and engineering teams who need to understand what to fix, what to improve and where to invest next.

01

Infrastructure audit

Find the weak points in reliability, capacity and cost across Kubernetes, clouds, networks and observability.

OutcomeA prioritized map of infrastructure risks
02

Platform & delivery

Review CI/CD, developer environments, GitOps and service ownership to make delivery more predictable.

OutcomeA practical plan to remove delivery friction
03

Incident analysis

Understand why an incident happened and what allowed it to happen, with a blameless review of systems and processes.

OutcomeCorrective actions your team can implement
04

Technical strategy

Make informed choices about architecture, migrations and platform investment, connected to business priorities.

OutcomeA roadmap with clear trade-offs
05

DevOps & SRE practices

Bring structure to SLOs, alerts, runbooks, capacity planning and the way your team operates production.

OutcomeRepeatable operational practices
06

AI in engineering

Assess where LLM tools and internal AI assistants can support development, with attention to data access and team workflows.

OutcomeA scoped pilot with evaluation criteria

02 / THE EXPERIENCE BEHIND THE ADVICE

I’ve built it.
I’ve operated it.
I’ve led the teams.

Portrait of Andrew Nikolsky

My career connects software development, production operations and platform leadership. I understand the code, the on-call reality and the decisions leaders have to make.

Platform leadership · Banki.ru

Led platform work across QA, frontend, backend and DevOps: observability, ChatOps, Kubernetes and developer productivity.

Operations leadership · Banki.ru

Managed support, operations and helpdesk teams, with infrastructure spanning two data centers, three clouds and 900+ virtual machines.

Builder & founder · ColorFor

CTO and freelance full-stack developer from 2006 to 2017. Built websites and online stores, and founded and co-founded product ventures.

View my LinkedIn profile
Tools I’ve worked with
Kubernetes · Terraform · Ansible · ArgoCD · Grafana · PostgreSQL · Kafka

03 / THE COLORFOR APPROACH

Know where you stand.
See what comes next.

A simple traffic-light assessment makes technical findings useful for business decisions. Each finding comes with a priority and a next step.

Red / Act now

Risks to availability, data or safe delivery that need urgent attention.

Amber / Plan the work

Technical debt and manual processes that slow the team and increase the cost of change.

Green / Build on it

Practices that work well and should be retained, strengthened and shared.

WHAT YOU TAKE AWAY

A plan your team
can put to work.

Risk map

What needs attention, why it matters and what can be consciously accepted.

30 / 60 / 90-day roadmap

Priorities, dependencies, expected outcomes and criteria for completion.

Working practices

Recommendations for runbooks, release checks, templates and operational guardrails.

04 / WORKING TOGETHER

From the first conversation
to the next concrete step.

  1. 01

    Discover

    We discuss your goals, constraints and the questions you need answered.

  2. 02

    Investigate

    I review the agreed systems, artifacts and workflows, and talk with your team.

  3. 03

    Prioritize

    You receive clear findings, trade-offs and a practical sequence of actions.

  4. 04

    Implement

    If needed, I support your team with reviews, guidance and progress checks.

05 / IDEAS FROM PRACTICE

The engineering behind the advice.

Selected technical articles referenced in my CV. Articles are in Russian.

01 / HABR

Test environments strike back

SOA, virtualization, databases and Kubernetes in a hybrid environment platform.

Read on Habr 02 / HABR

Jira, Go and a little imagination

Building a pipeline for creating new services.

Read on Habr 03 / HABR

A service without an owner

Managing orphan services in a microservices architecture.

Read on Habr

LET’S MAKE THE NEXT STEP CLEAR

What’s getting in
your team’s way?

Tell me about your system, the challenge and what you want to change. We’ll start by defining a useful scope.

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Based in Yerevan, Armenia