From Git Push to Production — Platforms You Own
Kubernetes, CI/CD, observability, secrets, developer portal, security. We build the complete Internal Developer Platform with your team. Open source. Knowledge transferred. You run it.
// OUTCOMES
What Your Team Gets
An Internal Developer Platform isn't a Kubernetes cluster. It's everything between a developer writing code and that code running safely in production. Here's what changes when it works:
Deploy times drop from hours to minutes.
Developers push to Git, changes reach production automatically. No tickets, no waiting for the platform team.
New environments in minutes, not days.
Self-service provisioning through a developer portal. Teams move without asking permission.
Full visibility, no surprises.
Logs, metrics, traces, alerts — one stack, one place. Your team sees what’s happening before users notice.
Security built in, not bolted on.
Policy enforcement, image scanning, secret management — automated in every pipeline. Compliance by architecture.
Costs you control.
Open source stack, self-hosted. No per-host pricing, no license surprises. Typical savings of 60–80% vs equivalent SaaS.
// WHY IT MATTERS
The Biggest Invisible Tax on Developer Satisfaction Is Time Spent Fighting Infrastructure
Engineers don't leave because of salary. They leave because the work stopped being interesting. A good IDP removes the friction that causes quiet disengagement — and amplifies the things that made them want to do this work in the first place.
More time on meaningful work.
When developers stop waiting for environments, debugging CI/CD, and navigating provisioning processes, they spend more time on problems they actually find interesting.
Autonomy without chaos.
Good platforms are opinionated enough to provide guardrails but flexible enough that engineers don’t feel constrained. Paved roads, not walls.
A signal that leadership cares.
Engineers read the quality of internal tooling as a proxy for how much leadership respects their time and craft. A well-built IDP says: we take engineering seriously here.
Complexity made manageable.
A good IDP abstracts the right layers so engineers can adopt new capabilities without becoming experts in every underlying system. Interesting without overwhelming.
No more tribal knowledge bottlenecks.
When undocumented knowledge is the only way to get things done, certain people become indispensable. A good platform codifies that knowledge and redistributes it.
Visible career growth.
When engineers can see the platform evolving — and can contribute to it — there’s a natural growth path from senior engineer to staff and principal.
// WHAT IS AN IDP
Kubernetes Is 20% of Your Platform. We Build the Other 80%.
An IDP isn't a Kubernetes cluster. It's everything between a developer writing code and that code running safely in production.
Foundation
Workloads run on any cloud — no provider lock-in
EKS / AKS / GKE / Scaleway Kapsule / bare metal
Platform Services
Code ships to production in minutes, not hours
GitLab, Vault, Flux
Observability
Full stack visibility — logs, metrics, traces, alerts
Grafana, Loki, Mimir, Tempo
Developer Experience
Self-service portal, golden paths, no tickets
Backstage
Security & Compliance
Policy enforcement automated in every pipeline
Kyverno / OPA, Trivy
// OUR STACK
Opinionated, Not Dogmatic
We've built this stack across dozens of implementations. We have opinions — and reasons for them.
| Layer | Tool | Why |
|---|---|---|
| CI/CD | GitLab Self-Hosted | EUR 200K+ savings vs. GitHub Enterprise, complete DevSecOps platform |
| GitOps | Flux | Better architectural fit, truly GitOps-native |
| Observability | Grafana Stack | EUR 300K-1.8M/year savings vs. Datadog, scales with infrastructure not invoices |
| Developer Portal | Backstage | No per-developer pricing, massive plugin ecosystem |
| Secrets | Vault / External Secrets | Industry standard, automated rotation |
| Identity | Keycloak | EUR 30K-150K/year savings vs. Auth0/Okta |
| IaC | OpenTofu + Crossplane | No vendor lock-in post-Terraform BSL, Kubernetes-native |
Your source code stays in your jurisdiction. CI/CD runners on Kubernetes cost a fraction of GitHub Actions. Full DevSecOps in one platform — no separate tools for scanning, registry, or issue tracking.
Scales with your infrastructure, not your invoice. No per-host pricing surprises. Open source, self-hosted, fully owned.
Better architectural fit with Crossplane and GitOps patterns. Pull-based reconciliation. Less operational overhead.
Developer portal you own. Service catalog, golden paths, plugin ecosystem. No vendor lock-in on your developer experience.
If you have tools that work, we keep them. We're not here to replace things for the sake of it.
// CLOUD AGNOSTIC
Cloud-Agnostic, Not Cloud-Naive
We build on any Kubernetes distribution. Your platform runs where your business needs it — hyperscaler, European provider, or bare metal.
“Vendor independence means you can move between clouds without rewriting your platform. That's not ideology — it's good engineering.”
// HOW WE BUILD
Embedded, Not Outsourced
We don't build your platform in a separate room and hand it over. We work inside your team.
- ✓Architecture decisions documented as ADRs
- ✓Target state and migration plan
- ✓Tool selection based on your constraints
- ✓Pair programming as default
- ✓Your code from day one
- ✓Typical: 4-24 weeks, 1-4 engineers
- ✓Your team runs it independently
- ✓Knowledge transferred, not documented
- ✓Optional managed operations if needed
- ✓Pair programming as default. Your engineers learn the stack by building it alongside ours.
- ✓Your code from day one. Everything lives in your repositories. No proprietary frameworks, no vendor lock-in on us.
- ✓Architecture decisions documented. Every significant choice gets an ADR — what we decided, why, and what we considered.
- ✓Typical engagements: 4–24 weeks, 1–4 engineers depending on scope.
Can't hire fast enough?
We embed senior platform engineers with your team for 3–6 months. Not body shopping — we build specific capabilities together and transfer knowledge so your team can take over.
Embed engineers with your team→Need someone to run it after?
We operate the full IDP — Kubernetes, GitLab, Grafana, Backstage, everything — 24x7 with European coverage. Full operations, shared on-call, or escalation support.
Talk to us about managed operations→// WHO THIS IS FOR
Is This the Right Engagement?
Companies building their first Internal Developer Platform
Teams scaling from a single cluster to multi-environment production
Organisations replacing SaaS DevOps tools with owned infrastructure
Platform teams that need senior capacity to accelerate a build
// NOT THE RIGHT FIT IF
When to Look Elsewhere
You haven't defined your platform direction yet. → Start with Strategy & Advisory — we can help you figure out what to build before building it.
Your primary goal is SaaS cost reduction, not platform building. → Start with a Freedom to Operate Audit
You need a managed Kubernetes product, not a consulting relationship. Consider Giant Swarm or Upbound.
// COMMON QUESTIONS
Questions We Hear Often
“I need to see your technical depth before I trust you.”
Fair. Here's our GitHub. Here's a talk one of our engineers gave at KubeCon. We're happy to do a technical deep-dive call where you can ask us anything — Kubernetes internals, networking, whatever you want to probe. We'd rather be tested than trusted on faith.
“We've been burned by consultants who couldn't actually do the work.”
Same reason we only hire practitioners. Every engineer at Aknostic has built and operated production platforms. Start with a small, time-boxed engagement — a 2-week spike or architecture review — so you can evaluate our actual work, not just our pitch.
“Why would I pay for this when we could figure it out ourselves?”
You probably could. The question is whether that's the best use of your time. You're solving problems nobody else at your company can solve. We handle the platform engineering so you can focus on the hard stuff — and your team learns the stack in the process.
// CASE STUDY
A nonprofit ocean science team needed a production platform but had no dedicated platform engineers. We built a full Kubernetes platform on European infrastructure in ~2 months — 100% CNCF open-source stack, under EUR 50/month, zero vendor lock-in. The team now deploys through Git commits with no kubectl required.
Read the full story→// RELATED SERVICES
Explore Related Services
Strategy & Advisory
Not sure what to build yet? Start with a strategic assessment to define your platform direction before committing budget.
Explore service→Freedom to Operate
Already have SaaS tools you want to replace? Map your lock-in, quantify costs, and migrate to open source alternatives.
Explore service→European Cloud Independence
Need your platform on European infrastructure? Explore sovereign cloud options for compliance and strategic independence.
Read more→Ready to build?
Tell us where you are — first cluster, scaling up, or replacing tools — and we'll tell you what an engagement looks like.