One specialist.
No body shop.
Hardcut is run solo by Marthinus Meyer (mar-TEE-nus) from Toronto. The person you talk to on the first call is the person who reads your infrastructure, writes the Terraform, runs the dry runs, and pushes the DNS change at 02:00 on cutover night. No subcontractors, no offshore handoff, no partner agency staffing the work behind the scenes.
A decade running production on AWS. Started with Ansible in 2014, before Red Hat bought it. Started with Terraform in 2018, before the HCL2 cutover. Watched a lot of companies try to migrate by stealth, in parallel, "when there's a quiet quarter." There is no quiet quarter. The migration that gets cut is the one with a date on it.
Hardcut exists because the consultancies that take this kind of work either staff it out to whoever is on the bench, or never give you a named cutover date. Both make the project rot. The fix is a single specialist, a fixed scope, and a window on a calendar that everyone agrees to defend.
A migration runs on judgment calls: what to lift, what to redesign, what to leave alone. Those calls don't survive handoff to a junior on a different timezone. So Hardcut runs eight to twelve engagements a year, each one owned end-to-end by the person who quoted it. That ceiling is the product, not a limitation.
Canadian compliance is a specialty, not an afterthought. Where the law puts you in scope (Quebec Law 25, PIPEDA, PCI DSS, PHIPA), I scope and price that up front, never as a change order at the end, with residency in ca-central-1 or ca-west-1 when you need it. Most other workloads land in us-east-1 or us-west-2 for cost, and that's where I'll meet you. Canadian regions are an option, not a default I'll push.
The job never changed.
The toolkit did.
One thread runs through every role: move production from old to new without anyone noticing. The toolkit changed. The job didn't.
- 2012 – 2016 DevOps The term landed in 2009 and stayed an argument for years. I was already gating infrastructure through peer review, and running Docker in production by 2015.
- 2016 – 2022 Cloud Cloud was not new when I went all in. Most companies still ran their own hardware. I spent those years moving them off it, lift-and-shift into platform.
- 2022 – 2025 Scale Enterprise scale. An 18-person team, a stalled migration across 100+ dev teams, unstuck and finished. The same craft, now a program.
- 2026 Agentic Now the multiplier is AI: agentic workflows and private inference, so one operator delivers what took a team. The wave is still forming.
What I show up with.
- AWS
- Ten-plus years · production architecture
- Ansible
- Since 2014 · pre-Red Hat acquisition
- Terraform
- Since 2018 · production from 0.11 onward
- Containers
- Docker in production · 2015 · EKS in production
- Compliance
- PIPEDA · Quebec Law 25 · PCI DSS · PHIPA
- Regions
- us-east-1 / us-west-2 · ca-central-1 / ca-west-1 for residency
If you're staring at a migration you've been putting off, let's talk.
Thirty-minute call by default. No deck, no sales engineer, no follow-up sequence. Either there's a Hardcut-shaped engagement here or there isn't, and you'll know which one by the end of the call.