When Kubernetes stops being “just infrastructure”
It’s one thing to stand up a cluster for a single application team. It’s another to run Kubernetes as a shared platform across dozens of services, teams, and environments.
At that scale, ad-hoc choices around namespaces, ingress, security, and observability turn into real risk and real cost. Our work focuses on the moment when Kubernetes stops being a proof-of-concept and becomes a critical dependency.
Our approach
1) Assess platform readiness
- Review existing clusters, add-ons, and operational practices.
- Map tenants: which teams, which apps, which data classifications.
- Identify gaps across identity, network boundaries, storage, and backup.
2) Design your opinionated blueprint
- Standardize how clusters are provisioned (IaC) and upgraded.
- Define patterns for multi-tenancy (per team, per app, or per env).
- Choose service mesh, ingress, and gateway patterns that fit your scale.
3) Build the “paved road” for teams
- Provide application templates, Helm charts, or operators for core use cases.
- Encapsulate complexity behind simple “deploy to env” workflows.
- Wire deployment flows into existing CI/CD and secret management.
4) Make SLOs the contract between platform and product teams
- Define SLOs per service tier (critical, standard, experimental).
- Instrument latency, error rate, saturation, and availability.
- Automate alerting and incident response around those SLOs.
Key benefits
- Consistent clusters with predictable upgrades and add-ons.
- Safer multi-tenancy through clear isolation and quotas.
- Faster onboarding for new services using boilerplates and docs.
- Reduced SRE load as more actions move to self-service.
How we typically engage
- Platform readiness review (2–3 weeks): architecture, ops, and tenant analysis.
- Blueprint & pilot (6–10 weeks): implement reference clusters and onboard 1–2 teams.
- Scale-out: extend patterns, train teams, and refine SLOs based on real usage.