Defining the modern Platform Engineering standard for startups.
Define your platform before it defines you.
Nakama Labs helps startups build manageable engineering platforms from day zero through practical standards, playbooks, technical writing, and advisory work.
Most startups do not fail at infrastructure because their engineers are bad.
They fail because platform decisions are made too late. The chaos is invisible — until it is not.
Weekly notes on the decisions behind modern engineering platforms.
Opinions held loosely, written down clearly. The reasoning behind real platform choices — not generic tutorials.
Do not default to Kubernetes from day zero
A decision log on when Kubernetes helps early teams and when it creates platform drag.
Split Terraform state by operational blast radius
A decision log on keeping Terraform state small enough to review, lock, and recover.
Use Spot nodes only for workloads that can disappear safely
A decision log on when Spot capacity belongs in startup Kubernetes clusters.
An evolving, public framework for startup platforms.
Ten layers every growing engineering team has to get right eventually. The Standard says what good enough for now looks like at each one — and what to revisit next.
Source Control & Monorepos
One clear place code lives, with branching everyone understands. The repo shape is a platform decision, not a personal preference.
Nakama Platform Blueprint
A focused advisory engagement for startups that need clarity before scaling their engineering platform. One pass over the whole platform, then a roadmap you can act on.
Built, tested, documented.
Nakama Labs publishes experiments, not generic tutorials — real setups, run end to end, with the trade-offs written down.
Turning hard-earned infrastructure lessons into standards other teams can follow.
Nakama Labs is led by Ramiro Castillo, a DevOps and Platform Engineer with hands-on experience across cloud infrastructure, Kubernetes, GKE, Terraform, GitOps, Agones, Cloudflare, observability, CI/CD, and production systems.
The work is not about making infrastructure sound complicated. It is about turning the lessons learned in production into practical standards other teams can read, challenge, and use before the messy parts become expensive.
Have a platform decision you are unsure about?
If your startup is growing and your infrastructure is becoming harder to understand, let’s talk.
Contact Nakama Labs →