Kubernetes platform
I built the platform, wrote the service contract every service ships through, and moved all 38 production services onto it with zero downtime. Deploys went from hours or days to five minutes, self-service, with one-click rollback.
- GKE
- Argo CD
- Kargo
- Kyverno
- OPA
- Helm
- Envoy Gateway
- Terraform
- GCP PAM
Service contractAbout ten lines per service drive its deployment, secrets, network policy, gateway routes and alerts, with no platform ticket.
The platform runs on five GKE clusters, about 600 vCPUs. A highly available Argo CD reconciles every cluster from Git, so what runs is always what was reviewed. Kargo promotes signed releases through dev, staging and production, and a Kyverno policy stops automatic promotion into production. Twenty OPA policies check placement and every GitOps change before merge. CI renders each change once, runs nine validation stages and posts one verdict, with a diff of what will change on each cluster. Traffic enters through an API gateway on Envoy Gateway, and Terraform builds the Google Cloud foundation underneath. Terraform went from two laptops with admin credentials to about 36 reviewed changes a week: each stack applies through Workload Identity Federation to a least-privilege identity, production changes wait for a named approver, and the tooling blocks an apply if the approved commit is no longer current. Nobody holds standing production access either. Access runs through GCP Privileged Access Manager with 87 tiered entitlements, a CLI that requests and approves access in seconds, and automation that keeps on-call permissions in line with the rotation, and it passed a NIST 800-171 customer audit. Then I moved production onto it. I turned 22 stalled pull requests into a staged rollout: merge every config dormant, enable one service at a time, snapshot each step for rollback and prove each cutover with a render-versus-live diff tool. All 38 services moved with no code freeze and nine days early, and 50 bespoke CI workflows were retired. The ingestion service, undeployable for four years, cut over in ten minutes. More than 15 engineers now ship through it, and a teammate onboarded 12 services unaided.
Service contract
One service definition of about ten lines, on a three-chart Helm family, replaces a platform ticket. It drives:
- Deployment
- Secrets from Secret Manager
- Network policy
- Gateway routes
- Alerts