← Engineering

Platform Engineering

Making deployment the easy part.

The gap

There's a recurring moment in Kubernetes adoption. The infrastructure team announces: "We're on Kubernetes now." The development teams look at a 200-line YAML file and ask: "How do I deploy my app?"

Without a platform
apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
  name: my-service
  labels:
    app: my-service
spec:
  replicas: 2
  selector: ...
  template: ...
... 180 more lines
With a shared Helm chart
image:
  repository: my-service
  tag: "v1.2.3"
resources:
  memory: "256Mi"
ingress:
  host: my-service.example.com
# That's it. The chart handles the rest.

Platform engineering closes that gap. Not by hiding complexity entirely — developers should understand what runs their code — but by providing sensible defaults so deploying a service isn't a week of YAML archaeology.

Helm charts as abstraction

A well-designed chart lets a developer deploy by filling in a short values file. The chart handles deployment strategy, health checks, service accounts, network policies, ingress, and TLS.

What the shared chart handles
Rolling deploys
Health checks
Service accounts
Network policies
Ingress + TLS
Resource limits
Pod disruption budgets
Security contexts
Prometheus scraping

Decisions made once by the team that understands them, reused across every deployment.

Secrets done right

Secret management is where platform setups quietly fall apart. Secrets in env vars, committed to private repos, shared over Slack — we've seen all of it.

SOPS + age
Encrypt in repo
Git versioned
Auditable history
Decrypt at deploy
Never plain text in repo

Simple enough that teams actually use it — which matters more than theoretical elegance.

CI/CD that developers like

A good pipeline is invisible. Push code, tests run, new version appears. A bad pipeline is one developers learn to work around.

What we aim for
< 5 min
Pipeline runtime
Parallel
Test stages
Cached
Docker layers
Delta
Deploy only changes

Starting small

Platform engineering can sound like a massive undertaking. Most companies with 50–1000 employees don't need internal portals or service catalogs to start.

1
Shared Helm chart + deployment guide
Week 1 — covers 80% of deployment needs
2
CI pipeline templates
Month 1 — new services ship on day one
3
Self-service tooling
When friction demands it — not before

Build the platform your team needs this month, not the one a large tech company presented last year.

Thinking about your developer platform?

We help teams build internal platforms that fit their size and needs. No one-size-fits-all, just what works.

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