Infrastructure, designed to disappear.
Cloud architecture and systems design for teams that want their infrastructure to stay out of the way. Based in Victoria, BC.
One practice. Three ways to work together.
Whether you need help shipping a project, a design deliverable you can build against, or someone to run the network long-term — the underlying work is the same.
Consulting
AWS and CDK work, usually embedded with a small team for a few weeks at a time. I like engagements scoped small enough to actually finish — refactors, migrations, the thing that's been sitting in the backlog. Increasingly spending time on agentic systems and LLM tooling.
Systems Design
Diagrams, decision records, and migration plans your team can actually build from. Useful when someone else will own the implementation — or when you want the thinking written down before anyone starts writing code.
Network Management & Design
Network design, deployment, and ongoing management for small businesses — access control, site security, VLANs, monitoring, and someone actually on the other end of the alert when it fires at 3am. Built primarily on the Unifi stack. Light on ceremony, heavy on the parts that matter.
Jason Parker
I've spent the last decade designing and operating the systems other people have to live with — cloud platforms at scale, networks that have to stay up overnight, the stuff nobody notices when it's working.
Onyx Labs started as a mechanical-keyboard design project — a place to put weird little mechanical-electrical things I was making on evenings. Over time it became the name I put on most of my work outside a day job. The name stuck. The work became infrastructure.
I'm based in Victoria, BC. I read more than I ship, but I ship.
Writing on the work.
Occasional notes on infrastructure, AWS patterns, network design, and the tools I use to think. No posting schedule — only when there's something worth writing down.
Full blog: tags, RSS, archive.
A structured silence, for now.
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On writing CDK that ages well
Unifi — what I wish I'd known
Let's talk about the work.
Whether it's a project, a retainer, a design review, or a full-time role — I read every email. Reply usually within a day or two.
hello@onyxlabs.xyz