
In this episode of Stay Sharp in Digital Engineering with Razorleaf, hosts Juliann Grant and Jonathan Scott are joined by Nick Link, founder of Bitoda and Fawdy.
Engineering applications in aerospace, defense, and regulated industries often cannot run in public cloud environments due to strict compliance rules. When these critical self-hosted systems go down on a weekend, vendor cloud support is not an option.
Nick discusses how Bitoda keeps self-hosted digital engineering tools running and how his AI incident response tool, Fawdy, allows service firms to scale efficiently while keeping customer data completely private within their own environments.
Guest Info
Nick Link: Founder of Bitoda and Fawdy. Nick transitioned from the Marine Corps to defense contracting and AWS, where he built AI applications for government agencies and enterprises. Bitoda provides managed application services for defense and aerospace MBSE programs, while Fodi acts as an AI site reliability engineer for IT incident response.
Key Takeaways
- The Self-Hosting Gap: Software vendors achieve their highest margins through standardized SaaS platforms, leaving a support gap for government-adjacent and defense teams that must self-host due to privacy and compliance requirements.
- Managed Application Services at Scale: Bitoda bridges the gap between internal IT departments and specialized engineering software by building automations, infrastructure as code templates, and declarative deployment models.
- AI Site Reliability Engineering: Fawdy operates as a read-only incident response tool. When a server or application fails, Fawdy inspects relevant logs, configuration files, and system statistics to deliver actionable reports so engineers can fix issues quickly.
- Data Control and Compliance: To satisfy strict regulations like FedRAMP and NIST, Bitoda operates entirely within the customer's cloud or on-premise account, using privately hosted LLMs so sensitive data never leaves the environment or feeds public AI models.
- Scaling Service Businesses with AI: Centralizing organizational knowledge into AI-driven knowledge bases allows service companies to scale horizontally and deliver outcomes without relying solely on SaaS models.
Resources & Community
Stay Sharp Member Community: Join our free member-only community to access episode summaries, checklists, bonus guest Q&A, and discussion threads.
Connect with Nick Link and the Stay Sharp team: Reach out to the Stay Sharp team at
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