Weeks 1–2
Assess
Measured baseline DORA metrics, mapped existing pipelines, and agreed a target delivery model with engineering leadership.
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CASE STUDY · PLATFORM ENGINEERING
Standardizing CI/CD and developer self-service on AWS
A shared delivery platform built on GitHub Actions, Argo CD, and Backstage replaced team-by-team pipelines across a growing microservice estate.
Industry
Financial services
Scale
45 microservices · 120 engineers · 3 AWS accounts
Duration
14 weeks
Service
Platform Engineering
12×
more frequent production deployments
4 hrs
lead time for changes, down from 5 days
67%
lower change failure rate
1 day
to onboard a new service, down from 3 weeks
THE CHALLENGE
Where things stood.
Every product team maintained its own build and release scripts. Releases were batched into a weekly window, required manual approvals in several tools, and frequently rolled back.
Platform and security teams had no consistent view of what was deployed where, and onboarding a new service meant copying and adapting another team’s pipeline.
OUR APPROACH
How the engagement ran.
Delivered in phases with a weekly status review and a steering check-in at each milestone.
Weeks 3–7
Build the paved road
Created reusable GitHub Actions workflows for build, test, scan, and image publishing, with Argo CD handling GitOps deployment to Amazon EKS.
Weeks 8–11
Developer self-service
Launched Backstage with a software catalog and golden-path templates so teams could create a production-ready service in one step.
Weeks 12–14
Migrate & hand over
Migrated services in waves, retired legacy pipelines, and trained platform owners on operating and extending the platform.
Technology stack.
AWS
GitHub Actions
Argo CD
Backstage
Kubernetes
Terraform
RESULTS
Before and after.
Measured against the baseline agreed at the start of the engagement.
| Measure | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Deployment frequency | Weekly release window | Multiple deploys per day |
| Lead time for changes | ~5 days | < 4 hours |
| Change failure rate | 18% | 6% |
| New service onboarding | ~3 weeks | 1 day |
| Pipeline definitions maintained | 45 bespoke pipelines | 4 shared workflows |
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START A CONVERSATION
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