How a Leading UK Software Company Used Kratix to Accelerate Developer Self-Service
“Giving our engineers the choice to use technologies they are good at and familiar with is the key to productivity and the developer experience. Using a [platform] framework that is not too opinionated makes this possible. Kratix is opinionated, but it’s opinionated in ways of enabling flexibility. Kratix never blocks you; you are only blocked by what you don’t know.”
- Platform Architect at Leading UK Software Company
This anonymised case study focuses on one of the largest UK-headquartered business management software providers, which develops and delivers software solutions across multiple sectors, including healthcare, hospitality, and everything in between.
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The software solutions and services help businesses manage a wide range of functions, from manufacturing to finance, from HR to payroll, and more. With a global footprint and more than 7,000 employees working to empower the more than 100,000 small and mid-sized organisations that rely on them, this company is growing, and, as a Platform Architect explains, “There are a lot of pieces of software that need to come together to provide our services to our customers.”
The Challenge
As one of the UK's largest and fastest-growing software providers, this organisation faced a common challenge: how to scale developer productivity without sacrificing operational standards. Their growing engineering teams needed fast, reliable access to infrastructure and services, but traditional ticket-driven models were too slow and fragmented.
The platform team recognised that simply investing in more tooling wasn't enough. They needed a way to validate their platform's effectiveness in real-world conditions, ensure governance without bottlenecks, and create a developer experience (DevEx) that engineers would genuinely love.
The Solution: Kratix and a
Hackathon-Driven Approach
To stress-test their internal platform, the company organised a series of company-wide hackathons. The goal was simple: if the platform could enable engineers to build and ship real applications during a hackathon, it would be ready for broader production use.
Using Kratix, the platform team:
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Built a modular internal platform using Kubernetes and GitOps principles.
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Defined clear, self-service APIs using Kratix Promises, enabling developers to request services like Postgres databases or full-stack application environments with minimal configuration.
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Separated platform control planes from worker clusters for better scalability, security, and fault isolation.
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Integrated Kratix with their internal developer portal, built on Backstage, enabling services to be requested through familiar interfaces.
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Why Kratix?
Kratix's Promise framework allowed the platform team to encapsulate operational logic and governance within each service offering. Developers interacted with a simple, consistent API, while the heavy lifting—deployments, configuration, and security—was automated behind the scenes.
Key benefits included:
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Developer Autonomy: Engineers could deploy services without waiting for approvals. The first hackathon saw 1445 commits by 170 authors, 89 pull requests and 212 deployments, which far exceeded expectations.​
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Operational Safety: Platform teams retained governance and security controls, enabling easy fleet management.
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Rapid Iteration: New services could be composed quickly from existing Promises, including popular middleware and service Promises available in the Syntasso marketplace, such as Redis, Dex, and Knative.​
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Debuggability: Only three teams contacted the platform team when their applications failed to start, and all were fixed rapidly.​
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Portability: GitOps workflows meant deployments were cloud-agnostic and highly portable.
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The Impact:
Platform Democracy in Action
The hackathon became more than just an event; it was a proving ground for the platform's success. The organisation embraced platform democracy. Teams from engineering, professional services, and beyond were able to contribute to the platform and ship working code in record time.
As a result:
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Platform adoption accelerated, with hundreds of projects onboarded. Two additional hackathons were run, further improving adoption.
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Developer feedback directly shaped the platform's roadmap, leading to quick extensions, such as new database offerings.
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The organisation gained a blueprint for building self-service experiences that strike a balance between speed and governance.
Key Takeaways
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Hackathons are a powerful way to validate platform readiness.
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Working code—not just architecture diagrams—is the ultimate proof of platform value.
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By building with Kratix, platform teams can create experiences that developers love while meeting enterprise needs for scale, security, and standardisation.