The Problem

Basis Technologies ran shared long-lived integration environments. Engineers queued up, stepped on each other’s changes, and environment contention was a constant source of delays. Setting up a fresh environment could take days — sometimes weeks if infrastructure issues arose.

The Solution

I designed and led the build of an on-demand full-stack environment system on AWS EKS. Each environment runs the full platform stack: application services, data warehouse, event streaming, and persistent storage.

Key design decisions:

  • Namespace-per-environment — complete isolation at the Kubernetes layer, no cross-contamination
  • Pipeline-triggered provisioning — engineers request an environment through the CI/CD pipeline, not through manual ops work
  • Automated teardown — environments are destroyed after use, keeping costs predictable

Results

  • Setup time: days-to-weeks → 3-4 hours
  • Concurrent environments at peak: 50-60
  • Shared long-lived environments: fully retired
  • Environment contention incidents: eliminated

Scope

This was a multi-quarter initiative. I handled architecture, implementation, documentation, and rollout — including two company-wide bootcamp sessions (Apr 2023, Dec 2024) to onboard the 30-engineer organization.