DevOps Engineering

The studio's own infrastructure on a self-hosted Kubernetes cluster, planned in February 2026 and maintained every day since: its website, CMS and MCP servers and the client platforms it looks after, served through Cloudflare tunnels, with every database dumped and checked each night, metrics and alert rules that reach a phone, an outage monitor outside the house, a container registry and an npm registry, and one private console that joins merges, runs, images, pods and nodes on a single page.

Builds and deploys moved from GitHub's hosted runners, where every run started on a fresh machine and releases waited on queues and incidents, to a runner pool at home: a build machine that takes every job while it is up, and standby runners on an always-on server behind a watchdog that fails towards shipping. Images go to a private container registry and the studio's libraries to a private npm registry, both in the building, and every run is archived past GitHub's retention. The slowest deploy went from eight minutes twenty-four seconds to three minutes five, and CI came out a third faster.

A second machine that can be switched off at any moment joined a running single-node cluster without a change to any application. An always-on server keeps the control plane, every database and volume and the first copy of every service; the build machine takes the builds and second copies of stateless services behind a taint, and those copies wait rather than fall back when it sleeps. It powers itself off when the work runs out and comes back when a job is queued, a console shows every node, workload and availability span, and every CPU request on the always-on server was measured, taking its reservations from eighty-four to fifty-six percent of what it can allocate.

Fully Booked ran on managed cloud infrastructure with a bill that grew every month and a stack nobody fully owned. We moved the whole platform onto a self-hosted Kubernetes cluster without a minute of downtime for the people using it. The cutover covered DNS, ingress, databases and the release pipeline, staged so that traffic shifted only once each layer had been proven on the new cluster. Nobody using the app that week knew anything had happened, which was the point. The recurring bill became owned hardware, and the same cluster now carries the platform's weekly releases.

GB

Contract

Remote

7

5.0

Fully Booked shipped as five Docker services on one DigitalOcean droplet behind Cloudflare, so a very small team could run a marketplace that holds deposits. One repository built every image, a compose file and a Makefile reduced a release to pull, build and up, a Caddy proxy handled certificates and security headers, and Playwright rendered every quote and invoice PDF on the server. Because the services were independent from the start, they later moved to a self-hosted Kubernetes cluster without a rebuild.

GB

Contract

Remote

7

5.0

The Fully Booked operator app reached the App Store and Google Play and keeps passing review, so UK minibus operators can run their business from their phone. The listings sell the business case one benefit per screenshot, compliance is built into the product with in-app account deletion and privacy declarations that match what the app collects, links open the app directly, and releases are staged so an update never breaks an operator's working day.

GB

Contract

Remote

7

5.0

A finished 27 Pearls app became approved listings on the App Store and Google Play inside a one-week engagement, without a round of rejections. The week covered release builds and signing, listing copy written around the student's benefit, screenshots for every required device size, privacy declarations that matched what the app collects, and a reviewer account that worked. The app remains on Google Play today.

US

Freelance

Remote

4

5.0