The challenge
Mott MacDonald’s digital solutions platform underpins many tools and services that all need to integrate cleanly and perform consistently. To speed up development, Simon Bell’s team built Digital Workspaces, an internal developer platform.
As the platform grew, so did the work of running its Kubernetes clusters. Developers were pulled away from building new capabilities to manage infrastructure.
“Our internal teams faced technical challenges in managing Kubernetes clusters within Digital Workspaces, leading to inefficiencies in innovation.”
The solution
Mott MacDonald made Plural the foundation of Digital Workspaces. Plural centralized fleet management behind a simple interface and automated a long list of manual tasks, so developers could work without touching Kubernetes internals.
It also extended self-service beyond Kubernetes:
- 01Kubernetes fleet managementOne place to run every cluster.
- 02Hardened GitHub reposProvisioned to meet strict cybersecurity standards.
- 03Data solutionsDatabases and data engineering tooling on demand.
Results
With Plural doing the heavy lifting, developers moved their effort back to innovation and client work. The platform now scales with a growing number of clusters, supporting Mott MacDonald’s digital transformation without trading off performance or reliability.
“Our teams are now able to deliver new features faster, and we’ve reduced the time spent on maintenance by a significant margin. This has directly translated into cost savings and increased revenue potential.”
Beyond Kubernetes
The value reached Mott MacDonald’s wider cloud estate. Self-service provisioning now covers databases and data pipelines built on open-source tools, giving teams more control with less overhead.
