We build Internal Developer Platforms on multi-tenant Kubernetes clusters — with service mesh, GitOps delivery, and self-service capabilities that let your teams ship without filing infrastructure tickets.
Engineered for growing organisations.
Kubernetes has become the de facto standard for container orchestration — but running production clusters at scale is an entirely different discipline from deploying a tutorial application. Multi-tenancy, RBAC policy sprawl, secret rotation, cluster upgrades, network policy enforcement, and observability across hundreds of microservices introduce complexity that compounds with every team you onboard. Most organizations that adopt Kubernetes without a platform engineering strategy end up with a collection of bespoke clusters that are expensive to operate and impossible to govern consistently.
CloudForge builds Internal Developer Platforms on Kubernetes that abstract infrastructure complexity behind self-service interfaces. Our approach treats the cluster not as a destination but as the compute layer of a broader platform — with GitOps-driven delivery via ArgoCD, service mesh traffic management via Istio, and developer portals built on Backstage that provide golden paths for common workload patterns. Teams get self-service namespace provisioning, pre-configured observability, and standardized deployment templates without filing infrastructure tickets or understanding the underlying cluster topology.
Platform engineering is the organizational counterpart to Kubernetes infrastructure. We design platforms with clear contracts between platform teams and application teams — tenant isolation boundaries, resource quotas, network policies, and shared service APIs that let developers focus on business logic. Every platform we build includes day-2 operational runbooks, upgrade procedures, and capacity planning models because a platform that cannot be maintained by your team after our engagement is not a platform — it is a liability.
Common scenarios where this service delivers the highest impact.
Organization adopting microservices architecture and needs a production-grade Kubernetes platform built from scratch with proper multi-tenancy, GitOps, and observability.
Production-ready multi-tenant platform with GitOps delivery, service mesh, monitoring, and developer self-service — operational within 10 weeks.
Containerizing existing monolith or SOA applications and migrating them to Kubernetes without disrupting production traffic or deployment workflows.
Strangler-fig migration path with parallel traffic routing, automated canary promotion, and zero-downtime cutover from legacy deployment targets.
Shared Kubernetes cluster serving 10+ application teams requiring strong isolation boundaries, per-team resource quotas, and cost attribution.
Namespace-per-tenant architecture with network policies, RBAC isolation, resource quotas, and per-namespace cost attribution dashboards.
Platform team overwhelmed with infrastructure requests — need a self-service portal with golden paths for deploying standard workload patterns.
Backstage-based developer portal with software catalog, service templates, automated namespace provisioning, and integrated documentation.
Microservices architecture requiring mutual TLS, traffic splitting, circuit breaking, and distributed tracing across 50+ services.
Istio service mesh with automated mTLS, canary traffic routing, fault injection testing, and end-to-end distributed tracing via OpenTelemetry.
A proven methodology built for growing organisations.
Define cluster topology, tenancy model, and networking architecture
Implement ArgoCD-driven continuous delivery with environment promotion
Layer Istio traffic management and distributed tracing across services
Build Backstage software catalog with templates, docs, and self-service workflows
A SaaS company with 200+ microservices and manual deployments taking 2 hours each. Every deployment required a platform engineer to SSH into servers, run scripts, and manually verify health checks. Rollbacks took 4+ hours and often required weekend work.
CloudForge built a multi-tenant Kubernetes platform with ArgoCD GitOps pipelines, Istio service mesh for traffic management and canary deployments, and a Backstage developer portal with self-service namespace provisioning and golden path templates for standard service types.
We went from dreading deployments to deploying 15 times a day without thinking about it. The platform CloudForge built gave our teams genuine autonomy — and gave me back my weekends.
— VP Engineering, European SaaS Company
Production cluster architecture including control plane HA, etcd backup strategies, node pool management, PodDisruptionBudgets, and upgrade lifecycle automation.
Declarative continuous delivery with ApplicationSets for multi-cluster management, progressive sync waves, and automated drift detection and reconciliation.
Envoy-based sidecar proxy mesh for mutual TLS, traffic splitting, circuit breaking, fault injection, and distributed tracing across microservices.
Spotify's open-source platform for building developer portals with software catalog, TechDocs, and customizable service templates for golden paths.
Kubernetes application packaging with templated manifests, dependency management, release lifecycle tracking, and integration with GitOps promotion workflows.
Kubernetes-native infrastructure provisioning using custom resources — enabling teams to self-service cloud resources through the same GitOps workflow as application deployments.
Cluster architecture validated — topology, tenancy model, networking, and storage decisions documented and approved by stakeholders.
GitOps pipeline operational — ArgoCD managing deployments across dev, staging, and production with automated sync and drift detection.
Developer portal live with golden paths — Backstage catalog populated, service templates operational, and first teams self-serving namespaces.
Full platform operational — service mesh, monitoring dashboards, alerting rules, DR runbooks tested, and platform operations guide delivered to your team.
Every CloudForge engineer working on Kubernetes engagements holds CKA and CKAD certifications — not as a marketing badge, but as a baseline competency requirement. Our team has collectively managed 500+ production clusters across financial services, logistics, healthcare, and SaaS, giving us pattern recognition for failure modes that documentation does not cover.
We take a platform engineering approach rather than a cluster administration approach. The difference matters: cluster administration keeps infrastructure running, while platform engineering builds self-service capabilities that eliminate the bottleneck between application teams and infrastructure teams. We design for developer experience as much as operational excellence.
Our Kubernetes practice is built on cloud-native standards — OCI for container images, Helm for packaging, ArgoCD for GitOps, OpenTelemetry for observability, and Gateway API for ingress. We avoid proprietary abstractions that create switching costs, and every component we deploy can be operated by your team with standard Kubernetes knowledge.
We design platforms for your team's operational maturity, not ours. A startup with 5 engineers needs a different platform than an enterprise with 200 developers. We calibrate complexity to capability — starting simple and adding layers as your team grows into them, rather than deploying a reference architecture designed for a scale you have not yet reached.
Let's start with a technical conversation about your specific needs.