Ship product. Not infrastructure
DigitalCare designs, builds and operates internal developer platforms (golden paths, self-service environments, a developer portal) owned by you, built on open source, no lock-in, and operated day to day by our AI agents under senior engineer supervision.
The bottleneck isn’t your infrastructure. It’s the queue in front of it.
Every environment request is a DevOps ticket
A developer needs a database, a namespace, a preview environment, and waits for a human who is already carrying an incident queue.
Onboarding takes weeks before the first commit
New hires reverse-engineer tribal knowledge from Slack threads instead of running one command and getting a working service.
Every team invented its own pipeline
Six services, six deployment styles, six ways to roll back. Nobody can safely change anything they didn’t write.
Informal ops stops scaling around 30–50 engineers
What worked at 12 people becomes the breaking point: the people who know how things work are the constraint on everyone else.
All four are the same problem with a name: cognitive load on product developers. A platform exists to take infrastructure decisions off their desk without taking control away from them.
Build it, buy it, or have it built and operated. The difference is the integration tax.
A do-it-yourself internal platform is a program, not a project: a dedicated team for several quarters before the first golden path is usable, and then permanent maintenance nobody budgeted for. Buying a platform product moves the cost rather than removing it: someone on your side still has to run it.
| Build it in-house | Buy a platform product | DigitalCare | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Time to first golden path | A dedicated team for several quarters before the first path is usable | Fast to install, slow to fit: the integration work is yours | Weeks, starting with your highest-frequency case |
| Who maintains it | Your platform team, forever, alongside their other work | Vendor maintains the product; you maintain everything around it | Us, with our agents on the daily load, or your team after transfer |
| When the platform engineer leaves | The platform freezes; often the single largest risk in the program | The integrations they wrote become unowned | Nothing happens: knowledge lives in code, runbooks and agent context |
| Lock-in | None, but you carry the whole build | Licence, roadmap and pricing sit with the vendor | Open source in your repositories and accounts, so you can run it without us |
The platform team curates the path. It doesn’t handle the ticket.
Developer requests
“New service”, “new environment”, “new database”: from the portal or the CLI, no ticket.
Golden path template
A curated template emits the repository, the pipeline, the manifests and the ownership metadata.
Policy check
Security, cost and compliance rules evaluate at request time: on the path, not in a review meeting.
Environment provisioned
Running, observable, owned, minutes after the request, with no human in the middle.
Where the platform team sits: above the flow, curating paths: adding a new template when a case repeats, tightening a policy, retiring a path nobody uses. Not inside the flow, executing requests.
A platform is a product. Its users happen to work for you.
We treat the internal developer platform as a product with an internal audience: real users, measured adoption, a roadmap, and paths that earn their use rather than being mandated.
Internal Developer Platform
The whole developer-facing layer above your infrastructure: interfaces, templates, guardrails, ownership.
Golden paths & paved roads
The common cases done well: new service, new environment, new database, one supported way each, and it’s the fastest way.
Self-service provisioning
Developers get infrastructure on request, within policy, without an approval queue in the middle.
Developer portal
Backstage or Port, chosen at assessment, not assumed. Service catalog, ownership, docs and actions in one place.
Standardized CI/CD templates
One reviewed pipeline definition teams inherit instead of copying, including the rollback path.
Environment lifecycle
Ephemeral preview environments per pull request, created and destroyed automatically, with no long-lived staging graveyard.
Security & policy on the path
Policy as code inside the golden path: the compliant option is the default one, not a later audit finding, backed by our Security & Compliance Automation service.
Platform observability
Metrics for the platform itself: path adoption, provisioning latency, failure rates: product telemetry, not vanity dashboards.
Platform as a product
Developer interviews, adoption targets, a roadmap and a named owner. A platform nobody adopts is a rewrite of the old problem.
One decision, made at the assessment: how much of the platform you want to own.
Build and transfer
We build the platform, your team runs it. You get the code, the runbooks and the training; we stay reachable but off the critical path.
For teams with platform engineers who need a head start, not a hand.
Co-run
You own the platform, we operate it alongside your team: shared on-call, our agents on the alert flow, your engineers on product work.
The common choice, including for platforms you already built.
Fully managed platform
You don’t want to own a platform at all. We deliver it as a service: your developers only ever see the golden paths, and your applications are hosted, deployed and operated on it by us.
If you came here looking for managed hosting of your applications (what we used to call PaaS Solutions), this is your answer.
Competitors build a platform and leave, or sell you one to run. We operate it.
Platform ops are carried by our own agents. Metatron is the control plane: every alert investigated automatically, with an evidence-backed root cause rather than a bare page. Verdict turns findings into fixes: each one a pull request a human reviews and merges. Senior engineers remain accountable for every production decision.
Watches the platform and everything running on it. On an alert it assembles logs, metrics and change history into a root cause with the evidence attached. Read-only, always.
Proposes the change as a pull request: template fix, policy update, manifest correction. A human engineer reviews and merges. Nothing reaches production unreviewed.
Platforms are gaining a second class of user: agents. The same golden paths that a developer clicks in a portal will be called by an agent through MCP, with policy evaluated at request time and every call auditable. We design the paths so that both audiences go through the same guardrails, because a path an agent can bypass is not a guardrail.
Assess → Build → Operate.
Platform readiness assessment
A productized engagement, not a sales call: developer interviews, a cognitive-load and DORA baseline, a target platform architecture, and a roadmap to the first golden path. You keep the document either way.
First golden paths, then breadth
We ship one high-frequency path end to end before widening scope: first golden paths in weeks, not quarters. Everything as code in your repositories.
Hard timelines come from the assessment
Run it, or hand it over
Whichever delivery model you chose: co-run, fully managed, or transferred with runbooks and training. Paths keep getting paved as new cases repeat.
We baseline before we build. Targets are set per client, not printed on a website.
| Metric | What we baseline at assessment | What we target |
|---|---|---|
| Deployment frequency | Releases per service per week today | On-demand deploys on the paved path |
| Lead time for changes | Commit to production, measured per service | A step change on the paths we pave first |
| Change failure rate | Share of releases needing a fix or rollback | Down, via tested templates and preview environments |
| MTTR | Time from alert to service restored | Down, with investigation done before an engineer opens the laptop |
| Time to first commit (new hire) | Days from laptop to merged change today | First day on the golden path |
| Self-served environment requests | Share of requests that reach a human today | The common cases self-served, exceptions escalated |
No invented before/after numbers. Targets are agreed per client at the assessment against your own baseline.
The numbers come from cases, and the cases are public.
A self-service path replaced environments built by hand for every client.
Held since a 4-hour rescue of a cluster that kept failing under load.
An automated release path with rollback tested, so deploys stopped being events.
Open source you own. Zero lock-in, including from us.
The platform is assembled from open source that lives in your repositories and your accounts. Portal choice, policy engine and GitOps controller are decided at the assessment against what your team already runs. We bring no proprietary layer you would have to license later.
FAQ10 questionsCloseOpen
How is this different from DevOps as a Service?
DevOps as a Service operates your infrastructure. Platform Engineering builds the product your developers use to operate it themselves: golden paths and self-service instead of tickets. Most clients take both: the platform is the interface, DevOps as a Service is the operations behind it.
Do we have to use Backstage?
No. The developer portal is chosen at the assessment: Backstage, Port, or none at all if a thin catalog and good templates already cover your cases. The portal is the visible surface, not the platform.
Who owns the platform?
You do. It is built from open source in your repositories, your cloud accounts and your clusters. If our engagement ends, the platform keeps running and your team keeps the code, the runbooks and the training.
What if our team is only 15 engineers?
Then a platform is probably overhead, and we will say so. Below roughly 30 engineers the honest answer is usually a few good templates, one paved CI/CD path and operations handled for you. We would rather tell you that at the assessment than sell you a platform program you don’t need yet.
Can you operate a platform we already have?
Yes, that is what co-run is. You keep the platform you built; we take the daily operational load, close the gaps in the golden paths, and put our agents on the alert flow.
How do we stop the platform becoming a straitjacket?
Golden paths are paved roads, not fences. The path is the fastest way to do the common thing; teams can always step off it. When several teams do, that is a signal to pave a new path, not to enforce the old one.
What can the AI agents change in production?
Nothing directly. Investigations are read-only. Fixes ship as pull requests a human engineer reviews and merges, so every change carries its own review trail.
How does this relate to Managed Kubernetes?
Managed Kubernetes is the runtime underneath. Platform Engineering is the developer-facing layer above it: templates, provisioning, environments, policy. Kubernetes on its own still leaves your developers writing YAML.
How long until the first golden path?
Weeks rather than quarters. We start with one high-frequency case, usually a new service or a new environment, and ship that path end to end before widening scope. Your specific timeline comes out of the assessment.
How is it priced?
Assessment first, then build work with a defined scope, then operations as a subscription billed by coverage. There is no public price list: the assessment produces the quote.
