Fries Consulting Services, LLC (FCS) is an IT infrastructure consulting firm based in Colorado. We design, build, document and monitor the systems our clients depend on, whether those run on hardware in your building, in AWS, or across both.
A large part of the practice is non-profit and K-12 work, a sector where budgets are set a year in advance and licensing costs compound against them. For schools that also means E-Rate spending and filing, along with CIPA compliance. Most of what we build is open source, which keeps recurring cost off your budget and keeps control in your hands.
Services
- Network audits and documentation — a complete account of every device on your network: how it connects, which VLAN it sits on, and where the configuration has drifted from what anyone intended. The documentation is yours to keep.
- E-Rate funding support and CIPA compliance — planning Category One and Category Two spending, working through the application cycle, and putting filtering and policy in place that keeps the funding intact.
- Private cloud and virtualization — Proxmox VE clusters backed by Ceph distributed storage, sized against the workloads you actually run rather than a vendor’s reference architecture.
- VMware to Proxmox migration — a practical exit from Broadcom-era licensing, covering cluster design, VM migration and the backup strategy that has to come with it.
- Infrastructure monitoring and alerting — Grafana, InfluxDB, Prometheus and Telegraf, tuned so that an alert arriving at two in the morning means something is genuinely wrong.
- AWS architecture and cost optimization — architecture review, right-sizing and spend analysis for AWS environments that grew faster than anyone documented them.
- Infrastructure as code — Pulumi and Terraform, which turn your environment into something reviewable in a pull request and reproducible on demand.
- Server architecture and installation — Windows Server, Active Directory, MSSQL, file services and Linux, along with hardware recommendations and repeatable desktop imaging.
- Kubernetes and CI/CD pipelines — cluster setup and support, containerization with Docker, and GitHub Actions pipelines that take deployment out of anyone’s hands.
- IT asset inventory — a current record of hardware and software tied to the people responsible for it, with automated reporting when something changes.
- Automation, API development and integration — scripting, custom APIs, and UI automation for the line-of-business software that never shipped an API.
- Local AI and filter log analysis — self-hosted models on Ollama and a single NVIDIA GPU, categorizing content filter logs for CIPA evidence without student data ever leaving the building.
- Data analysis and visualization — dashboards and scheduled reports built against data you are already collecting and probably not looking at.
- Ransomware recovery operations — incident recovery and rebuild, followed by the backup design that makes a second event survivable.
The Services page covers each of these in detail, along with how engagements are structured.
Who we work with
Non-profits and schools. A charter school is our largest ongoing client, and that work shapes how we approach the sector. Budgets are fixed a year in advance, funding often arrives with strings attached, maintenance windows follow the academic calendar rather than your convenience, and “IT staff” frequently means one person wearing four hats. We plan around those constraints instead of treating them as obstacles.
Small businesses that have outgrown ad-hoc IT but have no reason to employ a full infrastructure team.
In both cases the work takes two shapes. Sometimes we act as the infrastructure team outright. Other times we come in alongside internal IT staff who need a specialist for one particular project.
Why open source matters here
Much of what we build carries no license cost at all, Proxmox and Ceph and Grafana among it. For a non-profit or a school, that is not an ideological preference so much as an arithmetic one. A capital purchase is a line item your board approves once, while a per-VM or per-seat subscription grows at every renewal against a budget that does not grow with it. Our private cloud cost breakdown puts real numbers to the difference.
Where we work
We work on-site across the Denver metro and Northern Colorado, including Fort Collins, Loveland, Greeley, Longmont and Boulder. Remote engagements run anywhere in the United States, and a good deal of this work is remote by nature.
How engagements work
Most work is project-based, with a defined scope and a deliverable you can point at: a network audit, a Proxmox cluster build, a monitoring rollout, an automation project. Ongoing advisory support is available once we have completed a first project together and know your environment properly. Every engagement opens with a scoping conversation, so that what you are buying is settled before any work begins.
Contact
Use the contact form. Tell us about your current environment, the problem you are trying to solve, and your timeline — that combination gets you a useful answer fastest.