A new project goes live in ten days instead of two months
Uplatform, Prague
Product company. Full-time, 2020–2025: Head of DevOps, then Head of Infrastructure.
- Environment for a new project
- Before:
2 monthsAfter:10 days - Infrastructure team
- Before:
1 engineerAfter:10–12 in two teams
Where it started
There was no dev or production environment. Developers ran front end and back end on their own machines and connected to each other over the office network to test anything together.
There was no DevOps practice and one engineer. The product still had to reach production, and new projects had to follow.
What I did
- Started with hiring, not technology. The first hire existed so I could take a holiday without anything stopping. The second I grew from mid-level to a senior who handles things on par with me.
- Built the DevOps department from zero: hiring, training, mentoring, technical direction. Ten people hired personally.
- Shared development environments instead of laptops, a demo environment where management sees the product at any moment, then production.
- Automated the rollout of new projects — this is what turned two months into ten days.
- CI/CD and Ansible deploys: manual releases became a process.
- Monitoring, alerting, logging, backups and a disaster recovery strategy.
- Started the move to OpenStack to cut cloud dependency and hardware cost.
What changed
- Environment for a new project: from 2 months to 10 days.
- Infrastructure team: from one person to 10–12 across two teams.
- Infrastructure worth $10–20k a month under management — every environment, every client.
- Problems became visible before they turned into incidents.
- Role expanded from Head of DevOps to Head of Infrastructure in under two years.
After the handover
None of it existed before me, and more than a year after I left, the team I hired and the processes I built keep running. I was building a system, not my own irreplaceability.
Stack: GitLab CI/CD, Jenkins, Ansible, Prometheus, ELK, OpenStack, Terraform
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