Stand-in cloud and DevOps capacity

Our client runs regulated payments infrastructure, where the quality of the delivery platform matters as much as the product sitting on top of it. Rather than carrying permanent headcount for every specialism, they bring in our engineers as stand-in capacity across cloud, DevOps and engineering. The payments portal had already been built and shipped on GitHub Actions. The rest of the estate had not - other services still ran their delivery through a separate legacy toolchain, which left the business maintaining two ways of building, testing and releasing software. Consolidating meant more than relocating repositories: pipelines, deployment paths and the practices around them had to be rebuilt to a standard the team would keep using once we stepped back.

Embed specialists into the existing teams rather than run a parallel vendor team. Treat the migration as a migration: repositories, pipelines and deployment workflows moved deliberately, not lifted and shifted. Extend a standard already proven in production rather than invent a new one - the GitHub Actions pipelines built for the payments portal became the reference for the wider estate. Introduce GitOps: ArgoCD so deployment state for Kubernetes workloads is declared in git, reconciled continuously, and auditable after the fact. Leave practice behind, not just configuration.

Migration off the legacy toolchain onto GitHub across repositories, pipelines and deployment workflows. One CI/CD standard on GitHub Actions, applied across services rather than per team. ArgoCD for declarative Kubernetes deployments: desired state lives in git, drift is reconciled automatically, and every change is traceable and reversible. Enterprise DevOps practice established as the team default way of working, not as documentation nobody opens.

Delivery infrastructure consolidated on a single set of CI/CD standards rather than two parallel toolchains. Deployments run through a declarative, auditable GitOps workflow instead of manually coordinated releases. The client scales specialist cloud and DevOps capacity up and down without carrying permanent headcount for every discipline. An ongoing relationship - we are engaged as new needs come up. What this engagement demonstrates: we can be called in as specialist capacity, consolidate delivery infrastructure in a regulated environment, and leave a standard the internal team keeps using once we step back.