Overview
Infrastructure changes were risky and slow. Environments drifted, deployments required manual steps, and reliability depended on a few people who understood the scripts. The goal was to adopt Kubernetes with a GitOps operating model that reduced toil and improved change safety.
Starting point
The platform had grown organically, with scripts and environment-specific differences that accumulated over time. This made onboarding harder, slowed down deployments, and increased the risk of configuration drift.
Goals & success criteria
- Reduce platform toil and infrastructure overhead
- Make changes reviewable and repeatable via infrastructure as code and GitOps
- Standardize deployments across environments
- Improve delivery speed while preserving reliability
- Transfer knowledge so the team could own the platform long term
What we did
- Platform roadmap: defined milestones that delivered value early (standardization, repeatability, and safe deploys) before deeper migration steps.
- Infrastructure as code: introduced Terraform patterns to codify environments and reduce drift.
- Kubernetes foundation: established baseline cluster patterns, workload conventions, and operational expectations.
- GitOps workflows: moved platform configuration into version control with clear review processes and automated reconciliation.
- CI/CD hardening: created controlled promotions and rollback strategies so deployments were fast and safe.
- Knowledge transfer: paired with engineers and produced runbooks and docs so ownership stayed with the team.
Key technical decisions
- Prefer “golden path” conventions over one-off customizations
- Use Git as the source of truth for platform configuration (GitOps)
- Standardize observability expectations early (metrics, logs, alerts)
- Build safer deploys with staged promotions and rehearsed rollbacks
- Document operational ownership boundaries and escalation paths
Risk management
- Avoided a big-bang migration by delivering incremental milestones
- Used controlled promotions to reduce blast radius
- Ensured rollbacks were reliable and practiced
- Maintained clear environment parity to prevent drift-driven incidents
Outcomes
The team reduced infrastructure overhead by 60% and cut deployment time by 80%. Platform changes became reviewable and repeatable, and engineering teams shipped faster with fewer operational surprises.
Handoff & operating model
- Runbooks for common operational tasks and failure modes
- Clear conventions for workload deployment and configuration
- A GitOps review workflow the team could sustain
- Documentation and pairing to support long-term ownership
If you’re facing a similar challenge
If you’re modernizing platform foundations and want a pragmatic roadmap, see Kubernetes and Terraform modernization.