The Story Behind Tight Line’s Ship-It Platform

Ship-It platform is an advanced, multi-tenant DevOps solution developed by Tight Line in collaboration with its client.

From its origin as a simple deployment tool to a standardized, enterprise-wide platform, Ship-It represents Tight Line’s commitment to innovation, adaptability, and engineering excellence.

How Ship-It evolved into a standardized DevOps platform:

Tight Line inherited the original Ship-It from a client acquisition. It was a Ruby-on-Rails-based tool tied to Capistrano. It was functional, but did not meet the standards necessary for long-term scalability and adaptability.

• Key challenge: Preparation for Kubernetes migration and modern DevOps needs.

Tight Line led a full system redevelopment, integrating the Kubernetes API to streamline operations and support long-term growth.

Results:

• Migrated 40+ environments consisting of more than 80 services in less than 2 hours
• Zero data loss during the move
• Tens of thousands of dollars saved monthly by replacing AWS with internal infrastructure

Seeing the potential beyond one use case, Tight Line transformed Ship-It into a multi-tenant platform supporting multiple organizations, each with their own application services and Kubernetes clusters.

Key features added:

• Clone Factory: Subsystem that supports development environment databases, allowing developers to access anonymized production databases for testing.
• Ephemeral environments: A design principle that helps save cluster resources and ensures that newly created environments have access to the latest features and sanitized database clones.

Tight Line launched Site Reliability Engineers (SREs) as a service to all users of the Ship-It platform. A year later, they built a dedicated migration team to assist business units in transitioning from VMs to Kubernetes and automated GitLab/Jenkins/Kubernetes pipelines, allowing new business units to onboard with minimal friction.

Today:

• 13+ business units at the client company use Ship-It
• Ship-it training has been integrated into the company’s developer onboarding LevelUp Academy

The Ship-It platform is a powerful example of what strategic collaboration and forward-thinking engineering can achieve. It began as a basic internal tool, and Tight Line’s vision rebuilt it into a robust, multi-tenant DevOps solution.

Ship-It now serves as the standard across the client’s organization by combining deployment efficiency with secure, production-like environments.

This transformation reflects Tight Line’s technical knowledge and commitment to adaptability, innovation, and long-term partnership.