Project Name
Production-Grade OKD Installation: Launched Container Platform in 6 Weeks
Our client is an early-stage SaaS startup building a workflow-automation product for mid-market operations teams. With funding secured and a launch date committed to early customers and investors, the founding engineering team – strong on product, thin on infrastructure – needed a production-ready container platform fast.
Their only Kubernetes experience came from a single-node development sandbox that had never been tested under load, had no backup strategy, and had no one on the team who had run a control plane in production before.
With six weeks until launch, the startup needed a partner who could design, build, and hand off a platform the team could operate on their own from day one without ongoing external dependency.
A committed launch date, no production environment, a single-node sandbox with no failover, and a founding team that had never operated a Kubernetes control plane in production.
- No Production Platform for Launch: The product was feature-complete but had only ever run in a local development sandbox. There was no staging environment, production cluster, or deployment path before the fixed launch date.
- No In-House Kubernetes Expertise: The engineering team lacked experience designing high-availability Kubernetes clusters, managing etcd backups, and creating operational runbooks for independent production support.
- Fixed Launch Timeline: Investor and customer commitments had locked the go-live date, leaving no room for delays in building the production platform.
- Single Point of Failure: The environment relied on a single control-plane node with no redundancy, load balancing, or tested disaster recovery, making any failure a potential outage.
- No Monitoring or Alerting: The platform lacked cluster monitoring, performance visibility, and proactive alerts, increasing the risk of discovering issues only after customers were affected.
Ksolves, an AI-first DevOps consulting services company, designed and delivered a production-grade OKD platform in six weeks, built for resilience, documented with a complete operational runbook, and handed over for independent management. Every decision focused on enabling the founding team to operate the platform confidently without ongoing external support.
- High-Availability OKD Control Plane: Built a production-ready OKD cluster with a three-node etcd quorum and load-balanced API servers, eliminating the single point of failure and ensuring uninterrupted operations.
- Automated etcd Backups & Recovery: Configured scheduled etcd backups to external storage and validated the restore process before go-live, ensuring proven disaster recovery from day one.
- Integrated Monitoring & Alerting: Deployed Prometheus, Grafana, and Alertmanager with dashboards and alerts for cluster, node, and application health, enabling proactive issue detection from launch.
- CI/CD-Ready Environment: Created isolated development, staging, and production namespaces with RBAC and resource quotas, providing a secure and deployment-ready platform.
- CIS-Aligned Cluster Hardening: Applied CIS-aligned security configurations, network policies, and resource limits to strengthen the platform before production traffic.
- Operations Runbook & Knowledge Transfer: Delivered a detailed operations and incident-response runbook, along with hands-on training, enabling the engineering team to manage the platform independently.
Technology Stack
| Category | Technology |
|---|---|
| Platform | OKD |
| Control Plane | etcd (3-node quorum) |
| Backup & DR | etcd Snapshots + Object Storage |
| Monitoring | Prometheus + Grafana + Alertmanager |
| Access & Isolation | Kubernetes RBAC + Namespaces |
| Documentation | Ops Runbook (Markdown/Git) |
From having no production environment to launching on a production-grade OKD platform, achieving zero customer-facing downtime, and enabling the founding team to operate the platform independently.
- Production Platform Delivered in Six Weeks: Built and deployed a production-grade OKD cluster before the committed launch date, enabling a successful customer-ready launch.
- Zero-Downtime High Availability: The three-node control plane has handled node maintenance and failures without customer-facing downtime, eliminating the risks of the previous single-node setup.
- Recovery Verified in Under 30 Minutes: Validated the etcd backup and restore process before go-live, ensuring cluster recovery in under 30 minutes.
- Full Observability From Day One: Deployed Grafana dashboards and Alertmanager before customer onboarding, enabling proactive monitoring and faster incident response.
- Independent Platform Operations: Equipped the founding team with a documented runbook and hands-on training, allowing them to manage, upgrade, and maintain the platform without ongoing external support.
Launching a SaaS product requires more than application readiness – it demands a production platform built for reliability and scale. Ksolves delivered a production-grade OKD environment with high availability, automated backups, monitoring, security, and operational best practices, enabling the startup to launch on schedule with confidence. Today, the platform runs reliably, and the founding team independently manages day-to-day operations without ongoing external support.
Racing a Launch Date Without a Production-Ready Platform?
