Braathe Gruppen

Role: Freelance Project Manager · 2020 · Norway

The Problem

By early 2020, Kubernetes had become the standard answer for anyone talking about modern application infrastructure. Every enterprise IT conversation eventually landed on containers, cloud-native, and Kubernetes. The problem was that most organizations talking about it still could not actually run it. The CNCF's own data from that year showed that close to 80% of companies could not find engineers with the container skills they needed. It was one of those moments where demand was clear but the supply of people who could execute on it was almost nonexistent.

Braathe Gruppen, one of Norway's largest cloud and IT services providers, saw the opening. Their clients were already asking for help getting to cloud-native. They did not want to hire a platform team or spend months learning Kubernetes internals. They wanted their applications deployed, scaled, and managed without the operational overhead. Braathe wanted to build a product that could do exactly that, and they needed someone to lead it from concept to a working build.

That is where I came in.

The Solution

The product we built was AppBasky, a self-service platform for deploying and scaling containerized applications on Kubernetes. The idea was simple enough: you connect your GitHub repository, push your code, and the platform takes care of everything after that. No writing deployment scripts. No touching cluster configuration. No needing to understand what Kubernetes is actually doing under the hood.

Each push to GitHub generated a new versioned release automatically. Deployments happened without taking the application offline. Rolling back to a previous release was a single action. Custom domains and SSL certificates were handled out of the box. And because Braathe's clients ran on different infrastructure, we built the platform from the start to run on any Kubernetes cluster, whether that was hosted on a public cloud or sitting in their own data center.

One of the bigger product calls I pushed for early was to ship AppBasky as open source. In a space as technical as Kubernetes tooling, credibility with developers matters more than any sales process. A well-maintained open-source project on GitHub could build that trust faster than anything else. It also kept the commercial path open, with a paid layer that could be added on top later.

The Execution

Braathe brought in a Filipino development team to build the software, and I was brought in to lead them. We had eight months and a team that ranged from two to five engineers depending on the phase. Managing a remote team across time zones while building something in genuinely new technical territory meant the process had to be tight but not heavy. That does not leave much room for going back and forth, so the first thing I focused on was getting the scope locked down.

The core deployment loop had to work before anything else got touched. GitHub integration, build, deploy, live URL. Once that end-to-end path was solid, everything else could follow. Feature ideas that came up mid-sprint got documented and moved to the backlog. There was no shortage of good ideas, but good ideas introduced at the wrong point kill projects like this.

Delivery ran through GitHub Issues and Projects. I kept the process deliberately lightweight. The team was sharp and did not need a lot of hand-holding, but they needed clear priorities and a single person making the hard calls on scope. Short sprint cycles, consistent async communication, and regular syncs with the Braathe stakeholders in Norway to make sure we were still pointing in the right direction.

Getting the open-source launch right also took real effort beyond just making the repository public. I spent time on the repo structure, the documentation, and how the project would come across to a developer finding it for the first time. If it was going to function as a community project, it had to look like one from day one.

The Result

We shipped AppBasky in August 2020, on schedule. For a small team working in a space that most engineering organizations still considered expert-only territory at the time, that was a meaningful outcome.

The platform delivered on what it promised. GitHub-triggered deployments, zero-downtime releases, automatic rollbacks, custom domains, SSL. It ran on any Kubernetes cluster and supported the runtimes Braathe's clients actually used: Node.js, Python, Ruby, Java, and PHP, along with WordPress hosting built specifically for the agencies using the platform.

What I take away from this engagement is not just that we shipped on schedule. It is that we shipped something credible. The architecture was clean, the open-source repository was production-quality, and Braathe had a real foundation to build a commercial product on top of. In 2020, when most companies were still trying to get a handle on Kubernetes basics, getting that done in eight months with a lean team was not a small thing.