Container as a Service: Self-Service Deployment at Global Scale

The firm engaged Taller to deliver a self-service deployment platform for its global developer population, one of the internal platforms its own developers and operations teams run on.

Deploying an application at the firm required real technical knowledge of containers and deployment techniques, knowledge most developers didn't have. Earlier internal attempts had not reached the firm's developer population, and comparable market solutions still demanded more DevOps skill than most teams could assume. Left unsolved, many developers simply would not be able to ship their applications.

Taller built a platform that let any employee with minimal DevOps knowledge deploy a production-ready application in less than an hour: paste a GitHub repository URL and branch into the UI, and the platform deployed the application automatically and returned its URL. The engineering underneath was substantial. Knative provided scale-to-zero workloads (apps that consume no resources when idle) on AKS (Azure's managed Kubernetes service). Istio segregated customers' workloads within shared clusters so tenants stayed isolated from one another. A custom Python SDK managed complex pipeline automation, and app registrations were created automatically to give every application its own authentication. Dynamically created pipelines onboarded new applications, orchestrated with Argo Events and Argo Workflows, observed through Datadog, and policed with Kyverno. When the firm changed its identity infrastructure, the team redesigned the authentication solution and coordinated the transition with every application on the platform.