Shardly · Est. 2025 · Germany
Go build something.
We are a small German company that owns its machines, writes its own software, and would rather you spent your week on the interesting part.
- Frankfurt
- Falkenstein
- Nuremberg
We own the metal.
Compute we bought outright, in cabinets we racked ourselves, in three facilities somebody from here has physically stood in.
We own the metal . — Compute we bought outright, in cabinets we racked ourselves, in three facilities somebody from here has physically stood in.
We write the software . — Every layer above the hardware — the control plane, the editor, the supervisor, the billing — is ours. There is no vendor to blame and nobody else's roadmap to wait on.
We answer the ticket . — The person who wrote the subsystem is the person who replies about it. Support is not a department here; it is the same people, on a different afternoon.
We keep it in Europe . — Workloads, backups and logs stay inside the EU. Not as a compliance checkbox bolted on afterwards, but as the constraint the whole platform was drawn around.
We answer to nobody . — No investors, no board, no growth target set by somebody who has never used the thing. The company is funded by what it sells, which makes the plan short and the decisions ours.
The name
A shard is the smallest piece that still works alone.
Split a workload into shards and each one keeps running when its neighbours do not. It is the failure model we build to and the reason the company is called what it is: the interesting question is never how a system behaves when everything is fine.
It is also how we run the business. Small pieces, owned individually, replaceable without ceremony, and none of them depending on a supplier who has never met the person waiting for an answer.
Where we are
Three buildings, one country, no middlemen.
Every region is hardware we bought and racked. We can tell you what is in a cabinet because we put it there, and we can tell you which building it is in because we drove to it.
- FRA1
- Frankfurt am MainCompute · gateway edge
- FKS1
- FalkensteinCompute · object storage
- NBG1
- NurembergCompute · backup vault
By the numbers
Four figures we are willing to put our name on.
Each of these carries its own method. A number that cannot say where it came from does not belong on a company’s front page.
The rest of it
Everything else about us, in four rooms.
01The companyWho we are, what we decided early, and the history that follows from it.Open 
02The technologySix layers, from the cabinet to the file editor, and why we build all of them.Open 
03The newsroomAnnouncements, engineering notes and everything we have said on the record.Open 
04The workOpen roles, how we hire, and an honest account of what the job is like.Open The whole idea
Go build something.
The servers are on shardly.xyz. The company behind them is on the rest of this site — and the people behind that answer their own email.