Case study · GreenTech
Platform engineering for a GreenTech scale-up — local prototype to global platform
The challenge
A Series A climate-tech company had outgrown its single-cluster, hand-rolled Kubernetes setup. New customer onboarding required environment-by-environment manual configuration; deploys depended on one engineer; and the platform team was a bottleneck for every product squad.
What we did
We designed a multi-cluster architecture (per-environment + dev sandbox), migrated to GitOps with Argo CD, introduced environment overlays via Kustomize, stood up a Backstage developer portal with paved-path templates for new services, and ran four pairing weeks to transfer ownership to the in-house platform team.
Results
4×
deployment frequency
From ~3 deploys per week to ~12 per week within 90 days of cutover.
70%
reduction in onboarding time
New service from idea to staging deployment dropped from 5 days to 1.5 days via paved-path templates.
99.95%
cluster availability
Sustained through two cluster upgrades during the engagement, both rehearsed and uneventful.
35%
GKE cost reduction
Right-sized requests/limits, Spot for batch, and aggressive scheduled scale-down for non-prod.
"We went from one person owning the cluster to the whole platform team operating it confidently. The runbooks are the difference."