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Stop Fighting Your Infrastructure.
It's Time to Build a Platform.

I'm Peter Stukalov, a Staff Platform Engineer. I build Internal Developer Platforms (IDPs) that create a "Golden Path"
for developers. It’s a systemic solution that unifies the best practices of DevOps and SRE to achieve four key business objectives:
accelerating development, ensuring reliability, enforcing strict security controls, and reducing cloud costs.

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GitOps

Your Platform Health Checklist

Category I: Financial & Business Risks

  • Team growth outpaces product growth: The number of engineers and their costs are rising, but development velocity isn't increasing.

  • Fear of business compromise: There's a constant fear that one careless commit with a secret in Git will lead to disaster.

  • "Indispensable" employees: Critical knowledge is stored in the heads of 1-2 "veterans," whose departure would halt development.

  • Opaque economics: It's impossible to calculate unit economics and the real cost of supporting a feature or client.

  • Paying for "air": You're paying for static, idle resources 24/7 instead of using them on demand.

Category II: Low Velocity & Productivity

  • Productivity blocked by tickets: Your expensive developers are stuck in queues, waiting for simple requests to the infrastructure team to be fulfilled.

  • The "war" for dev environments: Developers can't get isolated, production-like environments and are forced to "fight" over a shared, unstable one.

  • Long onboarding: A new engineer becomes productive in months, not days.

  • Non-core work: Developers are forced to deal with infrastructure, creating low-quality and insecure solutions.

Category III: Technical Risks & Unreliability

  • Unpredictable rollbacks: Any production failure risks turning into a multi-hour incident with an unpredictable outcome.

  • "Sacred cows": Key parts of the infrastructure are so fragile that everyone is afraid to touch them, leading to an architecture of "crutches."

  • Unknown "blast radius": Any change requires weeks of regression testing because no one knows what else it might break.

  • Recurring incidents: The same problems arise again and again because symptoms are being treated, not root causes.

  • Post-failure "archaeology": The absence of a unified change history turns finding the cause of any incident into a lengthy investigation.

My Approach

I don't believe in patching holes or manual processes. I don't believe in "firefighting heroes" because even the most brilliant engineer makes mistakes. I believe in systems where automation and repeated testing of configurations across different environments reduce the probability of human error to almost zero. This is the only approach that allows for fast and reliable product development over many years.

My philosophy is simple: good infrastructure is infrastructure you don't think about. It just works. It's predictable, secure, and actively helps your developers build the product by simplifying and accelerating their workflows.

To achieve this, I build Internal Developer Platforms (IDPs). This isn't just a set of tools. It's a unified, automated environment where 100% of changes go through a controlled Git process. Where developers get the resources they need through a simple self-service portal, not through tickets. Where a safe release rollback is a standard operation, not a cause for panic.

In the end, you get more than just "configured DevOps." You get a scalable, predictable, and cost-effective system that becomes the foundation for your business growth.

For Technical Specialists:
A Deep Dive

This article describes my approach at a high level. If you're an engineer and you're interested in how this system works under the hood, I've written a detailed technical article. In it, I break down the architecture to the last bolt: from basic CI/CD to hybrid GitOps platforms with Terraform, Argo CD, and Jsonnet.

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I'm not proposing a multi-year construction project. I offer a fast and transparent process that delivers results from day one.

Services

The Process: From Chaos to Platform

1. Architect Foundation Deployment
(2-5 days)

I deploy a base version of the platform in your cloud. It includes Kubernetes, Argo CD, and all the necessary tools for GitOps, monitoring, and infrastructure management.

2. Demonstration and Training
(1 day)

I conduct a workshop for your team. Together, we deploy the first "hello-world" service through the new GitOps process to show how it works.

3. Migrating Your Services

Next, we start migrating your existing microservices to the platform. For a container-ready service, this process takes up to a few hours per microservice.

Beyond Implementation: Platform Ownership and Evolution

Building a platform isn't the end; it's the beginning. Infrastructure, like your business, must constantly evolve to meet new market challenges. 
After the initial implementation, my work enters a new phase: platform ownership and strategic development.

1. Strategic Development:

I continue to own the platform roadmap, keep an eye on new technologies, and integrate solutions that give your business a competitive edge.

2. Mentoring Your Infrastructure Team:

I work with your engineers, helping them become full platform owners, tackle more complex challenges, and grow professionally.

3. Architectural Oversight for Developers:

I help your development teams design applications to leverage the platform's capabilities most effectively and prevent poor architectural choices that could create problems in the future.

4. Proactive Architectural Evolution:

Proactive Architectural Evolution: I act as the guarantor of long-term reliability, solving the most complex architectural challenges and preventing potential problems before they become incidents.

Abstract Blue Light

Proven Results

Case Study: FinTech Startup (PayGears)

  • The Challenge: A multi-cloud FinTech platform on AWS EKS and Azure AKS needed to maintain 99.99% uptime while scaling to 4,500 RPS. Creating new, isolated "banking" environments was slow and risky, and releases were plagued by manual configuration errors.

  • The Solution: I codified the entire stack using Terraform Cloud and GitHub Actions, enabling new environments to be created via a single Pull Request. I implemented a GitOps-driven platform with Argo CD and Jsonnet to automate releases and enable fast, predictable rollbacks. I also engineered an intelligent autoscaling solution with Karpenter and KEDA to optimize costs.

  • The Results:

    • Increased release frequency by 4x by eliminating 95% of manual configuration errors.

    • Reduced Mean Time to Recovery (MTTR) from hours to minutes with automated, predictable rollbacks.

    • Achieved significant cloud cost savings (over 30%) by maximizing Spot instance utilization during peak loads.

Passed PCI DSS & SOC 2 audits successfully, with the Git-based, fully auditable platform reducing preparation time from weeks to just days.

Case Study: AI Company Platform (ThisWay Global)

  • The Challenge: An AI company needed to scale its platform to 18 million daily evaluations while maintaining >99.99% reliability. The Data Science team was bottlenecked by a multi-hour, manual, ticket-driven process for deploying new ML models. Model training was too expensive, and preparing for SOC 2 & ISO 27001 audits took months.

  • The Solution: I designed and built a multi-cloud Kubernetes backbone for their entire AI suite. I created and automated an MLOps platform using Argo Workflows and Kubeflow, empowering data scientists to fully automate their model release lifecycle. To cut compute costs, I architected a compute layer with Karpenter to leverage cheap GPU-powered Spot instances for model training.

  • The Results:

    • Reduced ML model deployment lead time from hours to under 20 minutes, completely eliminating the manual, ticket-based process.

    • Cut ML training compute spend by over 18% by using GPU Spot instances, which also increased experiment velocity for the research team.

    • Reduced SOC 2 Type II & ISO 27001 audit preparation time from months to weeks with a fully auditable, Git-based evidence collection platform.

    • Eliminated entire classes of configuration errors and significantly reduced MTTR by training 30+ developers in advanced GitOps practices.

Reliability

Case Study: Next-Generation Social Network Platform

  • The Challenge: A startup building an innovative social network on GCP faced a classic problem: great developers were forced to manage infrastructure. The result was chaos. Microservices were manually deployed to raw instances using docker-compose, there was no orchestration, and debugging was a nightmare. The team had a brilliant idea—to implement canary deployments based on HTTP headers to test new microservice versions on production data—but lacked the expertise to build it.

  • The Solution: I built them a full-fledged IDP on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) and Istio, fully managed via GitOps. The Istio service mesh made their dream a reality: developers can now route a portion of traffic to a new service version simply by specifying headers in a request. This opened up incredible possibilities for safe testing and debugging in a live environment with tools like Telepresence.

  • The Results:

    • Innovation Unlocked: Talented developers finally got the tools to implement their bold ideas. The speed of testing and shipping new features increased dramatically.

    • A Debugging Paradise: Instead of spending hours trying to reproduce bugs in unstable dev environments, engineers could safely debug code on real production data and service interactions.

    • From Chaos to Order: Manual instance management became a thing of the past. The platform provided the stability, predictability, and scalability worthy of a next-generation product.

Case Study: Hybrid Platform for Industrial IoT/Edge Equipment

  • The Challenge: An Israeli manufacturer of high-tech laser cutting machines faced a non-trivial challenge: how to centrally manage the software ("firmware") on hundreds of massive machines installed at customer sites worldwide. Each machine was essentially a bare-metal server. Updates, telemetry collection, configuration changes, and emergency SSH access in case of hardware failure were major headaches that slowed product development.

  • The Solution: I designed and implemented a hybrid cloud platform that turned each machine into a first-class citizen of a unified GitOps ecosystem. A key task was adapting non-standard firmware: a critical component for converting blueprints into laser algorithms was based on MATLAB Runtime, which is Windows-only by default. I ported it to Linux and containerized it. A Kubernetes cluster was embedded in each machine, connecting to a central management cluster in AWS via a secure VPN tunnel. The entire system is managed by ArgoCD with three environments: a cloud-native dev for rapid development, a pre-prod on a real machine in the office for final testing, and prod—the entire fleet of customer machines.

  • The Results:

    • Centralized Fleet Management: They gained the ability to roll out updates, change configurations, and monitor the health of hundreds of physical devices worldwide from a single control plane, as if they were regular microservices in the cloud.

    • Phenomenal Reliability: The GitOps approach ensures that every machine runs an identical, tested software version. The risk of human error during on-site updates was eliminated, and rolling back to a previous version takes seconds.

    • Accelerated R&D for Hardware: Developers could test new firmware versions in pure-cloud dev environments, drastically shortening the development cycle and cost of experimentation for a physical product.

Flexibility and controllability
Auto-scaling and resource saving
Transparency
Compliance with standards
Full support and assistance

Stop Wasting Time and Money. It's Time to Act.

You've read this far, which means at least one of the problems described is yours. You can close this tab and go back to firefighting. Or you can spend 30 minutes on a call with me.

On this free strategy session, we will:

  1. Break down your current situation. Straight and to the point.

  2. Outline 3 concrete steps you can take next week to reduce the chaos.

  3. Determine if my approach is the right fit to solve your problems.

This is not a sales call. It's a session that will leave you with more clarity. Worst case, you get a free consultation from an expert with 20 years of experience. Best case, we start building a platform that will save you millions.

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