The problem
Twelve product teams were each solving deployment orchestration on their own: placement across clusters, ordering, versioning, and compliance configuration. It was hard on three fronts:
- Engineering: multi-cluster rollouts with strict ordering across different compliance regimes are unforgiving. One bad rollout has a portfolio-wide blast radius.
- Business: twelve teams reinventing the same glue meant months of duplicated, inconsistent work.
- People: the hardest part. Teams rarely give up control of their own deployment path willingly, so converging on one framework was as much an influence problem as an architecture one.
The approach
HERBS lets a team describe its application as a bundle, and the platform handles placement,
ordering, and versioning. It’s built on ArgoCD, CUE, and Helm with a two-layer GitOps model, and
includes pre-deployment impact analysis (herbs-diff) so every change shows its blast radius before
it ships.
I owned the architecture and the load-bearing decisions, and deliberately had a teammate write most of the initial implementation under my guidance to grow him into an owner. It worked: teammates now write their own architecture decision records for HERBS and author the majority of its commits.
The next step is agentic: a conversational API over HERBS resources, so operating the platform becomes a matter of asking rather than hand-editing YAML.
Outcome
- 12 teams deploy through HERBS today.
- ~500 version rollouts since launch, peaking at 91 in a single month.
- Zero production outages on platform-owned systems since launch.
- A reusable core that replaces the bespoke deployment glue each team would otherwise maintain.