Internal Developer Platform on EU-Sovereign Kubernetes
A golden-path developer platform that cut deployment lead time from weeks to minutes - GitOps-based, self-service, and operated entirely on European cloud infrastructure.
Challenge
Fourteen development teams shared one ops team of three. Every new service meant tickets: namespaces, certificates, databases, monitoring - lead times of two to three weeks per environment. Each team had improvised its own CI/CD, so security patches and base-image updates were applied inconsistently, if at all.
Approach
We built an internal developer platform on EU-hosted Kubernetes with Backstage as the portal and ArgoCD for GitOps delivery. Golden-path templates cover the 90% case: a new service gets namespace, ingress with automatic certificates, a managed PostgreSQL database, dashboards and alerting - from one scaffolded repository. Guardrails instead of gates: OPA policies enforce resource limits, network policies and signed images at admission. Platform metrics (DORA) are published internally, so the platform team optimizes what developers actually wait for. We paired with the client's engineers for six months until they owned the platform outright.
Outcome
Lead time for a new production environment: under 20 minutes, fully self-service. Deployment frequency up 5x, change failure rate halved, and the ops team of three now runs a platform serving 14 teams. 100% EU hosting with on-prem-grade control - and zero dependency on proprietary platform services.