The Problem
A scale-up SaaS company had grown its engineering organization from 10 to 40 developers in 18 months. Their deployment process hadn't scaled to match. Deploying a single service required developers to file tickets with the platform team, navigate multiple manual steps, and wait days for their changes to reach production.
Developer satisfaction scores were declining. The platform team, overwhelmed by operational requests, had no bandwidth for strategic infrastructure work.
Key Constraints
Platform must support their evolving microservices footprint
Must not require developer knowledge of Kubernetes or Terraform
Existing CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions) must be preserved
New service bootstrapping must take less than 15 minutes end-to-end
The Solution
The solution centered on a Backstage-powered Internal Developer Platform with opinionated golden paths for the company's core service archetypes. Developers never interact with Kubernetes directly — they interact with a curated catalog of software templates.
Deployments are orchestrated by ArgoCD with GitOps-driven configuration. Crossplane provisions cloud resources (databases, queues) through the same Kubernetes API, giving developers self-service infrastructure without cloud console access.
Technical Architecture
Backstage Developer Portal
Centralized portal with Software Catalog, TechDocs, and templates. Single pane of glass for all engineering resources.
ArgoCD GitOps Engine
All deployments declared in Git. ArgoCD continuously reconciles desired vs actual state with automatic drift correction.
Crossplane Infrastructure
Platform team provides databases and queues as Kubernetes CRDs. Developers provision via YAML.
Policy-as-Code
OPA Gatekeeper enforces security, resource limits, and naming conventions at the Kubernetes API level.
"The team used to dread shipping features. Now they ship daily with confidence. The platform fundamentally changed the engineering culture."