Stop Copying Enterprise Infrastructure - DevOps for Small Teams

Most small teams don’t have an infrastructure problem.
They have a complexity problem they copied from companies 10x their size.

This is where we break that down.

For a while now we’ve been doing the kind of work that produces useful patterns. Kubernetes upgrades that didn’t go to plan and led to downtime, CI/CD pipelines built for two-person teams that needed to move faster, Postgres migrations on tables nobody wanted to touch, and the occasional rant about tooling that clearly wasn’t designed for people on call.

The notes have been accumulating in our heads, in private Slack threads, and in the margins of postmortems. This blog is where they go to be useful to someone other than us.

This comes from years of building and fixing production Kubernetes and OpenShift platforms, often in environments where downtime isn’t acceptable and mistakes are expensive.

This blog focuses on platform engineering and DevOps consulting for small teams that need reliable systems without unnecessary complexity. We work primarily with small businesses and local government teams, including Pueblo IT consulting engagements and similar environments.

What you can expect

• Field notes from real engagements.
  What actually works in production, and what it costs when it doesn’t.

• Short technical writeups.
  Focused, usable solutions without filler. Copy what you need and move on.

• Tooling opinions.
  Where tools help, and where they add unnecessary complexity and overhead.

• SMB and local government focus.
  Practical constraints, not hypothetical scale problems. Most engineering blogs assume a 200-person platform team. We don’t.

What you won't find

• Thought leadership.
• AI-generated filler.
• Tutorials that boil down to "run npm install."

How often

Roughly twice a month. Only when there’s something worth your time.

Stay in the loop

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Need help with the kind of thing we write about?

If you're dealing with manual deployments or ad hoc SSH-based workflows, see how we approach structured delivery pipelines.

If your systems are slow, manual, or harder to maintain than they should be, book a free 30-minute technology assessment.

You’ll leave with a clear understanding of what’s wrong and what to fix first.

Kyle, Steel City Solutions