Enterprise-Grade Cloud Infrastructure Automation

The Problem

MilanCloud S.r.l., a rapidly growing fintech scale-up, was drowning in operational overhead. Their 40+ microservices were deployed manually via SSH, configuration drift was rampant, and a single production incident in Q3 2024 caused a 14-hour outage that cost €380k in SLA penalties. Their CTO needed a platform team that could bring order to the chaos without halting feature development.

Strategy: Internal Developer Platform (IDP)

We designed and implemented a full Internal Developer Platform following the principles of Team Topologies and Platform Engineering. The goal was to abstract Kubernetes complexity behind golden paths — standardized, self-service workflows for development teams.

1. Infrastructure as Code (IaC)

All infrastructure defined in Terraform modules with a custom provider registry.
Multi-cloud support: primary on GCP (GKE Autopilot), disaster recovery on AWS (EKS).
Environments (dev, staging, prod) are structurally identical — only parameters differ.

2. GitOps with ArgoCD

Every deployment is a Git commit. ArgoCD watches repository state and reconciles the cluster automatically.
Progressive Delivery: Integrated Argo Rollouts with canary releases (5% → 25% → 50% → 100%) and automatic rollback on error rate spikes.
Secrets managed via External Secrets Operator syncing from HashiCorp Vault.

3. Observability Stack

OpenTelemetry collector deployed as a DaemonSet, forwarding traces, metrics, and logs.
Grafana dashboards with SLO-based alerting (error budget burn rate).
Distributed tracing across all 40+ services with auto-instrumented spans.

4. Developer Portal

Custom Backstage instance with service catalog, TechDocs, and scaffolder templates.
Developers can spin up a new microservice (including CI/CD, monitoring, and database) in under 5 minutes via a self-service wizard.

Technical Stack

Orchestration: Kubernetes (GKE Autopilot), Helm, Kustomize
GitOps: ArgoCD, Argo Rollouts, GitHub Actions
IaC: Terraform, Crossplane
Observability: Grafana, Prometheus, Loki, Tempo, OpenTelemetry
Security: Vault, Cert-Manager, Falco, OPA Gatekeeper
Developer Portal: Backstage

Outcomes

MTTR reduced from 14 hours to 12 minutes (99.2% improvement).
Deployment frequency: from 2/week to 15/day per team.
Zero configuration drift incidents since go-live.
Developer satisfaction (internal NPS): from 22 to 78.