A leading European financial services company partnered with BBD to create developer platforms that cut cluster and application deployment times from months to minutes
Objectives
Reduce deployment friction: Eliminate the high barrier to entry and specialised skills required to deploy and manage clusters for various business units
- Accelerate platform deployment: Drastically reduce the 3 – 6-month manual process for deploying new platforms and services
- Increase developer efficiency: Enable developers without deep Kubernetes knowledge to easily deploy applications and free up DevOps teams to focus on higher-value tasks
- Ensure compliance: Maintain security, governance, and operational standards in a highly regulated industry
Benefits
Massive time savings: Reduced cluster deployment from 3 – 6 months to as little as 20 minutes and application deployments to under 3 minutes
- Lowered barrier to entry: Enabled non-DevOps personnel to operate applications, expanding platform adoption across the organisation
- Increased efficiency: Standardised governance, security, and operational standards, boosting trust in the new platform
- Significant cost savings: The new multi-tenanted solution is projected to save over $345,000 annually
Overview of the solution
The client, a leading financial institution, needed to overcome significant friction in its developer platforms. The existing process for deploying new clusters and applications was manual, time-consuming (up to six months), and required specialized Kubernetes knowledge. This limited the platform’s use to a few expert teams and led to high operational overhead and error rates.
We addressed this challenge by delivering a “platform engineering framework” built on top of the client’s existing infrastructure. The solution included several key products:
- Cluster as a Service: This provided a fully managed Kubernetes cluster with built-in security, logging, monitoring, and alerting. This allowed engineers to request compliant, pre-built environments without the hassle of managing infrastructure.
- Namespace as a Service: We added a multi-tenanted layer that made it easy for developers without Kubernetes experience to deploy applications. This reduced costs for business units and made the platform more accessible to a wider audience.
- Camunda building blocks: This created a self-hosted, multi-tenant Camunda platform that allowed for the rapid and compliant deployment of business process management capabilities.
The result was a powerful new platform that not only drastically reduced deployment times but also lowered the barrier to entry for developers and standardized security and operational practices across the organization.
Approach
Our team partnered with the client to understand their specific challenges and regulatory requirements. We then leveraged our expertise in platform engineering to develop a new framework using AWS EKS and Kubernetes. Our approach focused on:
- Extending existing capabilities: We built the new framework on top of the client’s current platform to maximise existing investments and ensure a smooth transition.
- Creating developer-friendly tools: We designed “as a Service” solutions that abstracted away the complexities of Kubernetes, making the platform accessible to a much broader audience.
- Providing training and support: We delivered comprehensive training to ensure the client’s teams were fully equipped to use the new framework and continue its development.
Impact of BBD’s partnership
By delivering a new platform engineering framework, we helped the client move from a state of slow, complex deployments to one of rapid, streamlined efficiency. The new system enabled faster innovation, expanded platform adoption, and freed up specialised DevOps talent to focus on strategic, high-value work. The project also solidified the client’s trust in our platform engineering skills and laid the foundation for future projects, including a planned agentic AI platform.
