Service

DevOps Engineering

Delivery slows down long before anyone calls it a problem: pipelines nobody owns, environments that drift, releases that need a specific person awake, and production questions that take hours to answer.

Overview

What we deliver

We build the delivery layer between a commit and production — pipelines, environments, Kubernetes platforms, policy and observability — so that shipping is a routine operation and failures are recoverable.

DevOps consultingCI/CDKubernetesTerraformGitOpsPlatform engineering

Who this is for

  • Teams where releases require manual steps, tribal knowledge or a specific engineer.
  • Organizations running Kubernetes without a clear tenancy, upgrade or platform ownership model.
  • Engineering groups whose environments drift and whose incidents trace back to configuration differences.
  • Platform teams asked to support many product teams without a self-service model.
  • Companies adding security and audit requirements to an existing delivery process.
Problems we solve

What usually brings teams to this work

Release depends on people, not process

Manual steps and undocumented sequencing. We encode the release path in pipelines with approvals and automated rollback.

Environment drift

Staging and production diverge silently. We define environments in code with drift detection and reproducible provisioning.

Every team builds its own pipeline

Inconsistent quality gates and duplicated maintenance. We provide shared, versioned pipeline templates teams can adopt.

Kubernetes without guardrails

Cluster sprawl, unbounded resource use and unclear tenancy. We define a platform with namespaces, quotas, network policy and GitOps delivery.

Slow incident diagnosis

Logs without correlation and dashboards nobody trusts. We instrument services with tracing and define SLOs that map to user experience.

Security bolted on at audit time

Findings arrive after release. We move scanning, dependency policy and artifact signing into the pipeline.

Capabilities

How the practice breaks down

Each capability below is a discrete piece of work with its own deliverables. Engagements usually combine several.

01

CI/CD pipeline engineering

The problem

Pipelines grow per team, diverge in quality gates, and become unmaintainable copies of each other.

What we implement

A shared library of versioned pipeline templates covering build, test, security scanning, artifact publishing, environment promotion and rollback.

How it works

Templates are consumed by reference rather than copied, so a fix or new control propagates. Promotion between environments is gated by automated checks and explicit approvals where required.

Expected outcome

Delivery behaves the same way across teams, and improving one pipeline improves all of them.

Typical deliverables

  • Reusable pipeline templates and shared workflows
  • Artifact repository and versioning conventions
  • Environment promotion and approval model
  • Automated rollback procedure
  • Pipeline ownership and contribution guide

Technologies

GitHub ActionsAzure DevOpsGitLab CIJenkinsArgo Workflows
02

Kubernetes platform engineering

The problem

Clusters proliferate because there is no safe way for teams to share one, and each carries its own upgrade and security burden.

What we implement

A multi-tenant cluster design with namespace isolation, resource quotas, network policy, ingress and certificate management, and a defined upgrade path.

How it works

Workloads are delivered through GitOps from a repository of desired state, so cluster contents are reviewable and reproducible. Platform components are versioned and upgraded on a schedule rather than reactively.

Expected outcome

Teams get self-service namespaces with boundaries, and the platform team maintains far fewer clusters.

Typical deliverables

  • Cluster architecture and tenancy model
  • Helm charts or Kustomize bases for platform components
  • GitOps repository structure and sync configuration
  • Network policy, quota and admission control baseline
  • Upgrade runbook and maintenance calendar

Technologies

KubernetesEKS / AKS / GKEHelmArgoCDKustomizecert-managerIstio
03

Infrastructure as code and policy as code

The problem

Console-made changes cannot be reviewed, reproduced or reverted, and standards live in wiki pages nobody reads.

What we implement

A module library for the resources your teams actually provision, plus policy checks that run in pull requests.

How it works

Modules encode the approved pattern — naming, tagging, encryption, logging — so a compliant resource is the default output. Policy as code rejects non-conforming plans before they are applied.

Expected outcome

Infrastructure changes are reviewed like code, and the compliant option is the path of least resistance.

Typical deliverables

  • Versioned Terraform module library
  • State management and workspace strategy
  • Policy-as-code rule set in CI
  • Drift detection and reconciliation process
  • Module documentation and examples

Technologies

TerraformTerragruntOPA / ConftestCheckovAtlantisAnsible
04

Observability and SLOs

The problem

Teams have dashboards but cannot answer whether the service is healthy from a user's point of view.

What we implement

Instrumentation with traces, metrics and structured logs, correlated by request, plus service level objectives with error budgets and alerting tied to them.

How it works

Alerts fire on symptoms users experience rather than on every resource threshold, which reduces noise and makes on-call sustainable.

Expected outcome

On-call engineers get fewer, more meaningful alerts and can trace a failure to its cause without guessing.

Typical deliverables

  • OpenTelemetry instrumentation standard
  • Service dashboards and golden signal panels
  • SLO definitions and error budget policy
  • Alert routing and escalation configuration
  • Incident review template and process

Technologies

OpenTelemetryPrometheusGrafanaLokiTempoDatadogAzure Monitor
05

DevSecOps and supply chain security

The problem

Security findings surface after release, when fixing them is most expensive and most disruptive.

What we implement

Dependency and container scanning, secret detection, SBOM generation, artifact signing and provenance checks inside the pipeline.

How it works

Policies define which findings block a release and which are tracked, so the gate is predictable and does not become something teams route around.

Expected outcome

Security becomes continuous feedback inside delivery rather than a periodic external review.

Typical deliverables

  • Scanning stages integrated into shared pipelines
  • SBOM generation and artifact signing
  • Secret management and rotation approach
  • Vulnerability triage policy and ownership
  • Base image hardening and update process

Technologies

TrivySnykSyft / CosignHashiCorp VaultOPADependabot
06

Internal developer platforms and golden paths

The problem

Platform teams become a ticket queue because there is no supported self-service route for common tasks.

What we implement

Templated service scaffolding, self-service environment provisioning and a documented golden path from repository creation to production.

How it works

The paved road is deliberately the easiest option: a new service arrives with a pipeline, observability, security scanning and infrastructure defaults already wired in.

Expected outcome

Product teams ship without waiting on the platform team, and the platform team spends its time on the platform.

Typical deliverables

  • Service templates and scaffolding CLI or workflow
  • Self-service environment provisioning
  • Developer portal or documented golden path
  • Platform support and contribution model

Technologies

BackstageTerraformGitHub ActionsArgoCDCrossplane
What you get

Concrete artifacts, not slide decks

Everything below lands in your repositories and your cloud accounts.

  • Shared CI/CD pipeline templates in your source control
  • Terraform module library and policy-as-code rules
  • Kubernetes platform configuration and GitOps repository
  • Observability instrumentation, dashboards and SLO definitions
  • Security scanning, SBOM and signing integrated into delivery
  • Runbooks for release, rollback, upgrade and incident response
  • Enablement sessions and platform contribution guide
Delivery approach

Five stages, with deliverables at each

We work in reviewable increments and keep a route back at every step.

01

Assess

Review the current delivery path end to end: build, test, release, environments, on-call and the friction teams report.

  • Delivery assessment
  • Bottleneck and risk list
  • Prioritised backlog
02

Design

Define the target delivery model: pipeline structure, environment topology, tenancy, policy and observability standards.

  • Platform design
  • Standards and conventions
  • Adoption plan
03

Implement

Build pipelines, modules and platform components incrementally, proving each with a real service.

  • Pipeline templates
  • Module library
  • Platform components
04

Validate

Exercise the failure paths: rollback, cluster upgrade, node loss, dependency outage and alert routing.

  • Failure test results
  • Tuned alerts
  • Remediation actions
05

Operate and optimize

Migrate remaining teams onto the golden path, transfer ownership and iterate on measured friction.

  • Migration support
  • Runbooks
  • Ownership handover
Technologies

What we engineer with

Technologies we work with on this practice. We are not a reseller and hold no partner status claims — tooling is chosen against your constraints.

CI/CD

GitHub ActionsAzure DevOpsGitLab CIJenkinsArgo Workflows

Containers and orchestration

DockerKubernetesEKSAKSGKEHelmArgoCD

Infrastructure as code

TerraformTerragruntAnsibleCrossplaneBicep

Observability

OpenTelemetryPrometheusGrafanaLokiTempoDatadog

Security

TrivySnykCosignOPAHashiCorp Vault
Use cases

Common engagements

Manual release replacement

Replace scripted, human-sequenced deployments with a gated pipeline and automated rollback.

Cluster consolidation

Move team-owned clusters onto a shared multi-tenant platform with isolation and quotas.

Terraform standardization

Turn copied infrastructure code into a reviewed module library with policy checks.

On-call sustainability

Replace threshold noise with symptom-based alerting tied to service level objectives.

Audit readiness for delivery

Add approvals, artifact provenance and traceability from commit to deployed release.

Platform team leverage

Introduce self-service scaffolding so common requests stop arriving as tickets.

Why Protogenies

How we work on this

Proved on a real service

We validate every pipeline, module and platform component against a production service before rolling it out to the rest.

Adoption over mandate

Golden paths only work if they are easier than the alternative. We design for adoption and measure it.

Your tooling where possible

We work with the CI system, cloud and Kubernetes distribution you already run rather than importing a preferred stack.

Ownership is designed in

Contribution guides, module documentation and pairing sessions so your team maintains the platform confidently.

FAQ

Questions buyers ask us

Talk to an engineer about devops engineering

Bring your current architecture and constraints. We will tell you what we would change first and why.