Platform Operations

You built the infrastructure. Now who runs it?

Deploying a Kubernetes cluster, configuring CI/CD pipelines, and setting up cloud infrastructure is a project. Keeping it all running efficiently, securely, and cost-effectively is an ongoing discipline. Most teams are great at the first part and have nobody for the second.

That’s the gap we fill. Fractional platform operations—the experienced DevOps engineer watching your infrastructure, optimizing your costs, maintaining your pipelines, and handling the upgrades and incidents that are nobody’s full-time job.

The Problem We Solve

There’s a gap between “deployed” and “well-operated” that catches most organizations:

• Cloud costs drift upward silently. Nobody’s reviewing instance sizing, reserved instance coverage, or whether that dev cluster is still running over the weekend. AWS bills grow 10-15% per quarter through pure neglect.

• Pipelines rot. The CI/CD pipeline that worked great six months ago now takes 45 minutes, has flaky tests nobody investigates, and the deployment process has accumulated manual steps that aren’t documented.

• Kubernetes clusters accumulate debt. Resource requests that made sense at launch are now wildly wrong. Nobody’s planned the next version upgrade. Security patches are three months behind. Certificate rotation is someone’s TODO.

• AI infrastructure needs specialized attention. GPU utilization is at 30% because nobody’s tuning virtual GPU allocation. The model deployment pipeline has a bottleneck nobody’s diagnosed. Queue priorities haven’t been adjusted since the initial configuration.

Your developers can handle all of this. But they won’t, because they’re building features—which is exactly what they should be doing. Platform operations needs dedicated attention from someone who does this every day.

What We Do

CI/CD Pipeline Design & Management

Your deployment pipeline is the backbone of your delivery velocity. We build and maintain pipelines that are fast, reliable, and safe.

Pipeline Engineering

We design and maintain deployment pipelines across GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, and Jenkins—whichever your team already uses. This includes:

• Automated testing gates that catch real problems without crying wolf
• Blue-green and canary deployment strategies for zero-downtime releases
• Infrastructure-as-code pipelines (Terraform, CloudFormation) with proper plan/apply workflows
• Build optimization to keep pipeline execution under 10 minutes

Ongoing Pipeline Health

Pipelines need maintenance like any other system. We monitor build times, investigate flaky tests, update dependencies, and keep your deployment path clear. When a pipeline starts degrading, we fix it before it becomes a bottleneck.

AWS & Cloud Cost Optimization

Cloud cost optimization isn’t a one-time project—it’s a practice. We embed that practice into your monthly operations.

Active Cost Management

• Right-sizing EC2 and ECS instances based on actual utilization data, not launch-day guesses
• Reserved Instance and Savings Plan analysis with purchase recommendations
• Identifying idle and underutilized resources (that dev database nobody’s queried in three months)
• S3 storage tiering—moving infrequently accessed data to cheaper storage classes automatically
• CloudFront caching strategy to reduce origin requests and data transfer costs

Reporting & Accountability

• Billing alerts and budgets configured per team, project, or environment
• Monthly cost reports with actionable recommendations, not just charts
• Trend analysis showing where costs are heading and what’s driving the change
• Quarterly deep-dive reviews comparing actual spend against projections

We typically find 20-40% savings in the first month. Sustaining those savings requires ongoing attention—which is exactly what we provide.

Kubernetes Cluster Operations

Running Kubernetes in production is a full-time operational discipline. We handle it so your team doesn’t have to become Kubernetes experts.

Cluster Health & Maintenance

• Node pool management—right-sizing nodes, managing spot/preemptible instances, balancing cost and availability
• Upgrade planning and execution—testing new versions, coordinating rolling upgrades, having rollback plans
• Security patching on a regular cadence, not when someone remembers
• Certificate rotation before expiry becomes an emergency

Monitoring & Resource Management

• Prometheus and Grafana dashboards showing cluster health, resource utilization, and application performance
• Resource quota tuning based on actual workload patterns—preventing both waste and starvation
• Namespace management and access control as your team and workloads grow
• Alerting that’s tuned to notify on real problems, not generate noise

AI Infrastructure Operations

AI workloads have operational concerns that generic DevOps doesn’t cover. We manage the specific infrastructure that keeps AI systems performing.

GPU & Compute Operations

• GPU cluster health and utilization monitoring—knowing which GPUs are busy, idle, or degraded
• Virtual GPU allocation refinement as workload patterns evolve
• Model deployment pipeline management—keeping the path from trained model to production smooth
• Driver and operator version management across cluster nodes

AI-Specific Optimization

• Queue system tuning (RabbitMQ priority adjustments, worker scaling) based on actual traffic patterns
• Multi-provider routing optimization—ensuring requests go to the most cost-effective provider
• Cache hit rate analysis and improvement to reduce redundant API calls
• Capacity planning based on usage trends and growth projections

Engagement Model

Like our Fractional AI Architect service, platform operations works best as an ongoing relationship with predictable rhythm.

10 Hours/Week

Monitoring, cost reviews, pipeline maintenance, and incident triage. Good for organizations with stable infrastructure that needs a watchful eye and regular optimization.

Includes:

• Daily infrastructure monitoring review
• Weekly cost and performance check-ins
• Pipeline maintenance and dependency updates
• Incident triage and first response
• Monthly cost optimization report

15-20 Hours/Week

Active optimization, new pipeline builds, infrastructure upgrades, and capacity planning. Good for organizations with growing infrastructure or active migration/modernization projects.

Includes:

• Everything in 10 hrs/week
• New pipeline development and migration
• Kubernetes version upgrades and cluster expansion
• Cloud architecture improvements
• Capacity planning and scaling strategy
• Team enablement on operational practices

On-Call / Variable

Incident response, quarterly cost audits, and upgrade windows for organizations that need periodic rather than continuous support.

Includes:

• Incident response with defined SLAs
• Quarterly cost deep-dive and optimization
• Scheduled maintenance windows for upgrades
• On-demand support for infrastructure changes

Why Us

Same infrastructure we run in production. This isn’t theoretical operations knowledge. We manage production Kubernetes clusters with GPU workloads, multi-provider AI routing, and queue-based processing handling 100K+ operations monthly. We operate what we build.

Full-stack understanding. We don’t just monitor dashboards in isolation. When a latency spike hits, we can trace it from the Kubernetes pod through the application code to the AI provider API. Operations decisions are informed by deep understanding of what the infrastructure actually runs.

Production-proven patterns. Our monitoring, alerting, and operational procedures come from managing real systems under real load. We know what metrics matter, what alerts are actionable, and what can wait until Monday.

Honest economics. We’ll tell you when something isn’t worth optimizing. If your cloud bill is $2K/month and steady, you don’t need 20 hours/week of operations. We right-size the engagement to match the actual need.

Typical Engagement

Onboarding Audit (Weeks 1-2)

• Inventory current infrastructure, pipelines, and cloud resources
• Review monitoring and alerting coverage
• Analyze cloud costs and identify immediate optimization opportunities
• Document operational gaps and risks
• Deliver prioritized action plan

Establish Baselines (Weeks 2-3)

• Deploy or improve monitoring and alerting
• Set up cost tracking and budget alerts
• Create operational runbooks for common procedures
• Establish communication cadence and escalation paths

Ongoing Operations (Month 2+)

• Execute against the optimization roadmap
• Regular cost reviews and right-sizing
• Pipeline maintenance and improvement
• Cluster upgrades and security patching
• Incident response and resolution
• Monthly operations report with metrics and recommendations

Ready to Stop Neglecting Your Infrastructure?

If your cloud bill keeps growing, your pipelines keep slowing, and your Kubernetes cluster hasn’t been upgraded in longer than you’d like to admit—let’s talk. We’ll start with an audit to show you exactly where you stand and what the highest-impact improvements look like.