SYNTASSO KRATIX ENTERPRISE
VERSUS BUILD YOUR OWN PLATFORM ORCHESTRATOR
Your Platform Is Unique. The Plumbing Isn’t.
Talk to enough platform teams, especially enterprise platform teams, and you'll hear the same conclusion: no vendor can sell a platform that perfectly matches your business. Some parts always need to be built. The mistake is assuming the only cost is getting that first version working.
Most teams budget for the sprint that delivers a portal, some pipeline YAML, and a handful of Kubernetes Operators. They don't design for the flexibility a platform orchestrator provides or create a platform architecture that supports the years of maintenance, feature requests, platform evolution, and engineering efforts that follow.
Building it yourself means paying your most expensive engineers to solve the same platform problems every other platform team eventually solves.
SKE provides those common platform capabilities out of the box. Every capability becomes a Promise, which provides a consistent platform capability API, governance rules, and lifecycle. This wraps whatever you've already built underneath it, allowing your engineers to focus on the parts of the platform that actually differentiate your business.
tl;dr:
Build vs Buy
In-depth:
Why "we'll just build it" costs more than you think
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A portal wired to a pipeline is a demo, not a platform. Ownership, policy, and lifecycle management still have to be built and paid for long after the demo ends.
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Every custom Operator or automation component becomes another product to maintain. Kubernetes releases, changing APIs, bug fixes, and feature requests all compete for the same senior engineering time.
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Workflow engines automate processes, not platforms. Governance, scheduling, policy enforcement, and lifecycle management still need an orchestration layer, regardless of whether you're using Temporal, Camunda, n8n, or another workflow engine.
Looking to learn more?
Contact us for more information or to book a demo with a Syntasso solutions architect.
Regain Control Over Your Technology Decisions
Building your own platform orchestrator versus Syntasso Kratix Enterprise
Every organisation's platform should reflect the way it works. Your compliance model, approval chains, security policies, and even your definition of a "database" or a "service" are unique to your business. No vendor can sell you those because they aren't product features. They're how your organisation operates. Those are the parts you should build in your platform.
Where many platform teams go further is building the orchestration layer underneath those decisions: scheduling, policy enforcement, workflow execution, drift detection, approval routing, and lifecycle management. These aren't unique business capabilities. They're platform problems that almost every enterprise eventually has to solve.
This decision to "build your own" orchestrator is tempting until you realise the cost isn't getting the first version working. It's maintaining it for years as new environments, governance requirements, and platform capabilities arrive. Instead of building the next thing the business needs, senior platform engineers spend their time evolving the orchestration engine itself. SKE provides that orchestration layer, so your team can focus on building the parts of the platform that make your business different.
How does Build Your Own and
Syntasso Kratix Enterprise compare?
Comparison | Build it yourself | SKE |
|---|---|---|
Engineering focus | Maintaining platform plumbing | Building business-specific capabilities |
Governance and approvals | Added individually to each workflow | Applied consistently across the platform |
Scaling to enterprise | New capabilities built as requirements grow | Multi-cluster, multi-cloud and air-gapped support included |
Existing automation | Reworked to fit a new platform | Wrapped and orchestrated, not replaced |
Cost over time | Ongoing engineering investment and maintenance | Predictable software licence and platform engineering effort focused elsewhere |
Who can build and maintain it | Kubernetes and Go specialists | Any platform engineer using familiar tools |
Time to first capability | Months building the platform before delivering the capability | Days, because the orchestration layer already exists |
Governance affects more than
a single application
Imagine a platform team is asked to give developers self-service access to a new capability, say, a new AI model.
What happens next?
With "build it yourself"
The team starts, reasonably, with what's familiar: a portal button (Backstage, Cortex, Port), wired to a CI pipeline or workflow engine (Jenkins, Argo Workflows, Temporal), which runs a script or a newly written Operator to provision the environment.
It works. Day one is a demo win.
But once the capability is live, the hard part begins. Who owns it? How is policy enforced? How is it upgraded when the underlying model changes? How do you find every deployment when it's time to retire it? None of that comes from the portal button or the workflow. Multiply this across every new platform capability and the platform becomes a growing collection of one-off pipelines and Operators that only their original authors fully understand. Self-service has become self-maintenance.
With Syntasso Kratix Enterprise
The platform team installs SKE and focuses on defining the capability itself. The capability is captured as a Promise: its API, governance rules, dependencies, and fulfilment workflow. Underneath, it can reuse the same Terraform modules, Operators, scripts, or cloud APIs the team already trusts. SKE orchestrates them instead of replacing them.
The important point is that this AI capability is just one of many. Once the orchestration layer exists, adding the next capability becomes significantly cheaper than adding the first. For every request, SKE will:
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Validate the request against organisational policy
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Trigger approval workflows when required
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Schedule the workload to the right cluster, cloud, or air-gapped environment
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Detect drift across the entire fleet, not just what it provisioned
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Apply the same lifecycle management (upgrade, roll back, retire) to every future request automatically
The platform team still builds the logic that makes the capability unique. SKE provides the orchestration layer that every capability shares.
The benefits of SKE
Build Only
What's Yours
Every platform should reflect your own compliance model, approval chains, and definition of a "database" or a "service."
That part can't be bought; it has to be built.
SKE handles the common layer, scheduling, policy enforcement, and lifecycle management, so your most expensive engineering time goes into what's actually unique to your business.
With SKE you can:
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Skip rebuilding scheduling, drift detection, and approval workflows
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Wrap existing Operators, Terraform modules, or scripts instead of replacing them
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Redirect senior engineering time to your differentiators
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Standardise the undifferentiated 80% of your platform, and own the unique 20% for your organisation
Request the Same Way, No Matter Who Built It
Every capability built without a shared contract ships its own interface: a Terraform module here, a hand-rolled Operator there, a ticket for whatever nobody automated. Developers end up fluent in a dozen tools just to ask for a database or an environment.
SKE gives every capability the same request shape, a Promise, so what's running behind it is the producer's problem, not the consumer's.
What SKE enables:
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One consistent way to request any capability, no matter who built it
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Developers ask for outcomes, not tool-specific configuration
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New capabilities plug into the same interface, no new tool to learn
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Any team or vendor can publish through the same platform contract and API
Maintain It Once, Not Once Per Resource
Every capability provisioned today still needs patching, upgrading, and eventually retiring, for as long as it exists. Without a shared contract, that means finding every instance by hand, or hoping whoever built it remembers to.
SKE tracks lifecycle for everything a Promise creates, so an upgrade, rollback, or deprecation is one change, applied automatically everywhere it's running, not a hunt across however many clusters or teams picked it up.
What this enables with SKE:
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Fleet-wide upgrades and rollbacks instead of environment-by-environment fixes
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Drift detection and policy enforcement that doesn't stop at the edge of one pipeline
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Safe retirement of capabilities nobody remembers building
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An architecture that gets stronger under change, not more fragile
SKE & Build Your Own FAQ
Q. Doesn't building our own platform orchestrator retain more control?
Building your own governance model, business capability definitions, and approval chains gives you real control, and you should own that. These configurations are often confused with the power of an orchestration engine that supports them. Scheduling, drift detection, and lifecycle management are necessary, but that's not where your competitive advantage lives, and it's the part SKE already provides.
Q. We already have a portal and some CI pipelines. Isn't that a platform?
Portals and pipelines automate a sequence of steps. On their own, they don't track ownership, enforce policy, or manage what happens to a resource after day one. If nothing owns the resource once it's created, you have automation, not a platform.
Q. Why wouldn't we just extend Backstage to build our platform?
Because portals solve discoverability and self-service. They don't provide fleet-wide orchestration, lifecycle management, governance, or scheduling. SKE complements portals rather than replacing them.
Q. Why not just use Temporal, Camunda or another workflow engine to build our platform?
Workflow engines are excellent at automating processes, coordinating approvals, and executing long-running workflows, and many platform teams already rely on them. What they don't provide is the shared platform orchestration layer around those workflows: a consistent way to define platform capabilities, enforce governance, schedule work across clusters and environments, manage lifecycle, and perform fleet-wide upgrades.
SKE complements your existing workflow engine rather than replacing it, allowing it to focus on how a capability is fulfilled while SKE manages how that capability is requested, governed, operated, and maintained over time.
Q. We've already built Kubernetes Operators for some of this. Do we have to throw them away?
No. A Kratix Promise can wrap an existing Operator, Terraform module, Helm chart, or shell script. You keep the operational logic you've already invested in; SKE adds the scheduling, governance, and lifecycle management around it.
Q. When does it make sense to keep building this ourselves for now?
If your platform is genuinely single-cluster, single-team, and unlikely to need governance, approvals, or multi-environment scheduling any time soon, a portal and a pipeline may hold up for a while. Just keep an eye on it, as most organisations outgrow that faster than they expect, as new teams, regulations, and environments arrive and eventually one sensible decision at a time turns into a dead-end implementation. One option is to use the open source project Kratix to get started so you can easily upgrade if enterprise features are needed in the future.
Q. How is this different from just buying an off-the-shelf, opinionated developer platform?
A typical buy option is an off-the-shelf platform that is opinionated and asks you to adopt its application model and its control plane, effectively buying what only you should build. SKE takes the opposite approach: it doesn't replace what makes your platform yours; it gives you the orchestration layer underneath so you build only the unique parts, not the plumbing.
Q. What do we actually get on day one with SKE that we'd otherwise have to build?
Policy validation and approval workflows, multi-cluster and multi-destination scheduling, fleet-wide drift detection, and capability lifecycle management, versioning, rollout, rollback, retirement, integration into popular interfaces and infrastructures. These are the pieces that took other platform teams months or years to build, and are still commonly rebuilt from scratch today.
Q. Doesn't this just mean we're locked into Syntasso instead of locked into our own code?
Kratix, the framework underneath SKE, is open source, and Promises are built to wrap the tools you already use rather than replace them. You're not locked into a proprietary application model the way you would be with an opinionated SaaS platform; you can self-host, run air-gapped, and keep your existing Terraform, Operators, and scripts underneath.
The bottom line...
Building it yourself is an ongoing bill for undifferentiated plumbing.
Build what makes you different. Let SKE handle the platform orchestration layer.
Build your own to own everything. Use SKE to own what matters.