Platform Engineering
Internal developer platforms your engineers use and your team owns
We build production-grade platforms on open source: self-service provisioning, golden paths, and guardrails that enforce. Running in your infrastructure, in your repositories, operable by your team from the day we hand over.
The problem
The integration problem, not the selection problem
The components are free and the reference architectures are public. That is not where platform initiatives fail.
They fail in the integration. Kubernetes, GitOps, a portal, observability, secrets, policy, identity, and templating are each straightforward and collectively a six-to-twelve-month engineering project before a single developer self-serves anything. They fail in the operation, because keeping that stack current, secure, and upgraded is a permanent commitment that most organizations staff at a third of what it needs. And they fail in adoption, because a platform that was built without the developers who were supposed to use it gets routed around.
The symptom set is consistent. Environment requests still take days. There is a portal, but the real work happens in tickets. The platform team is the bottleneck it was created to remove. And the honest answer to “is the platform working” is that nobody is measuring.
What we do
What we build
We build internal developer platforms end to end, and we build them to be handed over.
Self-service that covers the real requests
Not a catalog of everything, a working self-service path for the things your developers actually wait for: an application environment, a database, a message broker, a namespace with defaults that are already correct. Provisioned through an abstraction your platform team can extend without us.
Golden paths that are genuinely the fastest route
A golden path only works if taking it is easier than not taking it. We build paths from repository template to running production workload for your actual application archetypes, with the compliance, security, and observability requirements already satisfied inside the path rather than bolted on at review.
Guardrails that enforce
Policy as code at the infrastructure and admission layers. The rules your security and compliance functions care about are enforced automatically, which is the only way they hold at scale, and it means “compliant” is a property of the platform rather than a review step.
Observability by default
A developer can see their service’s metrics, logs, and traces without asking anyone. This is the single change that most reliably shifts operational ownership left, and it is the one most platforms defer.
A platform your team can run
Everything as code, in your repositories, from the first commit. Runbooks written for your operators. Pairing rather than delivery. We measure the handover by whether your team performs an upgrade unaided, not by whether the documentation exists.
Our offerings
How we engage
Platform strategy and assessment
An evidence-based view of where you are, what the friction costs you, and what to build first.
Outcome
A costed, sequenced roadmap you can fund.
Platform build
Design and implementation of the platform foundation: control plane, provisioning, golden paths, portal, observability, policy.
Outcome
A running, production-shaped platform your team owns.
Developer portal enablement
Backstage or Port, with a populated catalog, working software templates, and the integrations that make it the place developers actually start.
Outcome
A portal with real adoption rather than a directory nobody opens.
Golden paths and self-service design
Path design for your application archetypes, with the abstractions and templates behind them.
Outcome
The common case takes minutes and needs no ticket.
Platform adoption and enablement
Onboarding your product teams, measuring adoption, and building your platform team’s capability.
Outcome
Adoption, which is the only metric that matters after go-live.
Platform operations
Day-2 ownership under an agreed service level, so your engineers work on developer experience instead of upgrade cycles.
Outcome
A platform that stays current without consuming your team.
How we work
Collaborative Implementation
We build with your team, not instead of it
Your platform engineers are embedded in the build. This is a condition of engagement rather than a nice-to-have, because a platform your team inherits is a platform your team resents.
We start from your developers
The first work is understanding what your engineers actually wait for, not what a reference architecture says they should need. The friction that matters is specific to your organization and it is usually not where leadership thinks it is.
We measure
Baseline before, measured after: lead time, deployment frequency, provisioning time, self-service coverage, and adoption. A platform initiative without a baseline cannot prove its value and will lose its funding in the second budget cycle.
We choose boring, standard, open
We use the components with the strongest ecosystems and the clearest exit paths. Where a commercial product genuinely wins, we say so. Where an open source component wins, we use it and, when it matters to you, we help maintain it.
Every architecture document names the exit path for every component. If that makes a component look bad, that is useful information at design time.
What you get
Objective driven results
Platform architecture with component decisions, rejected alternatives, and exit paths documented
The running platform, in your infrastructure, across your environments
All configuration as code in your repositories, from the first commit
Golden paths documented end to end
Self-service abstractions your team can extend
Operator runbook: routine operations, upgrades, failure modes, escalation
Developer-facing documentation
Baseline and post-implementation metrics
An adoption plan with the sequence and the metrics to watch
Where this sits in the stack
Part of a bigger picture
Platform engineering is the method, but it inherits constraints from below and enables workloads above. A platform built without a view on where it will run creates a sovereignty problem you discover during a migration. A platform built without a path for AI workloads creates a shadow platform the moment your first AI use case reaches production.
We build platforms that account for both.
Packaged offers
Start with a defined step
3 weeks
Platform Engineering Maturity Assessment
Find out in three weeks what your developer platform actually costs you, where it is failing your engineers, and what to fix first.
3 weeks
Kubernetes Security Review
Three weeks to a prioritised, evidence-backed view of how your Kubernetes clusters actually hold up, assessed against recognised benchmarks and against an attacker with a foothold.
8 weeks
IDP Foundation Sprint for a production-ready platform
A working internal developer platform in eight weeks. Open source, running in your environment, owned by your team, with no lock-in.
FAQ
Questions we get asked
We already have a platform team. What do you add?
Usually capacity and pattern knowledge, not replacement. Most platform teams are competent and under-resourced, and they are solving problems that have been solved elsewhere. We bring the reference implementations and the integration work, and your team keeps the context and the ownership. If your team does not want us there, the engagement will not work and we would rather establish that early.
Should we build or buy?
It depends on what you are optimizing for, and the honest answer is usually a mix. Commercial products win on time to first value and on the portal layer. Open source wins on control, cost at scale, and exit. Our maturity assessment gives you a per-capability recommendation, and we are not incentivized either way because we do not resell.
How long before developers see something?
An eight-week foundation sprint puts a working golden path in front of a pilot team by week 6. The first broad adoption wave typically follows within a quarter. Anyone promising organization-wide adoption in eight weeks is describing an installation, not an adoption.
We are on Kubernetes already. Is this still relevant?
Kubernetes is the runtime, not the platform. Most organizations we work with have had Kubernetes for years and still have developers waiting days for environments, because the self-service, golden path, and guardrail layers were never built.
What happens if we want to bring operations back in-house?
You take it. Everything is in your repositories on open source and standard tooling, and there is nothing proprietary to unwind. We will help with the transition, and this is written into the agreement rather than promised on a website.
Where is your platform today?
Whether you are three years in or three weeks in, the first useful conversation is the same: what are your developers actually waiting for, and what is it costing you.