Engineering1 min read
Shipping faster with a small platform team
How our engineering team gave a client's developers a paved road: templates, CI/CD and preview environments that took release cycles from weeks to days.
Kenji Watanabe
Principal Engineer · ITeraLove
A client's product teams were spending more time fighting their deployment pipeline than building features. We set up a three-person platform team for them.
What we built
- Service templates with logging, metrics, health checks and CI included.
- One pipeline that runs lint, tests, security scans and deploys.
- Preview environments for every pull request, so product managers could review real builds.
- Golden dashboards for every service, with no setup needed.
# .pipeline.yml: everything a new service needs
service: billing-api
runtime: node22
checks: [lint, test, sast, dependency-audit]
deploy:
preview: per-pull-request
production: manual-approval
Results after one quarter
- Release frequency: every 3 weeks → several times a week
- Time to first deploy for a new service: 5 days → 1 hour
- Fewer late-night incidents, because rollbacks became a single click
Platform engineering is less about tools than about making the right path the easiest one.