Financial Services  ·  Platform Engineering

App Builder Platform

Enabling domain teams to rapidly build and deploy production-grade, data-driven applications on top of an established data mesh - with standardised templates, tooling and patterns.

In association with eSynergy
Sector
Financial Services
Capability
star:platform
Technology
AKS, GitHub Actions, Terraform, GraphQL, Spring Boot, Apollo
The Challenge

Standardising the build of operational applications, consuming the data mesh.

The client had successfully implemented a data mesh architecture, distributing data ownership across business domains. Each domain owned, governed and published its data as a product - a significant organisational and technical achievement.

The next challenge was the application layer: how could domain teams rapidly build and deploy applications that consumed and enriched their domain data for operational use, without rebuilding the same scaffolding and making inconsistent architectural choices each time?

The organisation needed a platform that codified the right patterns once, and made them the path of least resistance for every domain team.

Pain Points

Inconsistent architecture across domains
Without shared patterns, teams made independent architectural decisions - producing fragmented, difficult-to-maintain application estates.
Duplicated scaffolding effort
Every new application required teams to rebuild the same boilerplate - CI/CD pipelines, secrets handling, API scaffolding - consuming significant engineering time before any domain logic could be written.
Long time to first delivery
The setup overhead meant teams spent weeks on platform concerns before delivering any business value from their domain data.
No standardised security posture
Secrets management, service authentication and CI/CD security scanning varied across teams - creating compliance inconsistency in a regulated environment.
The Solution

An opinionated App Builder Platform on AKS.

In association with eSynergy, Starlake designed and delivered an App Builder Platform hosted on Azure Kubernetes Service; a curated set of templates, tooling and patterns that gave every domain team a production-ready starting point for new applications.

AKS Platform Hosting

Azure Kubernetes Service provided the consistent runtime foundation, with shared cluster services, ingress, observability and namespace isolation for each domain application.

GraphQL Data Provider

A standardised template for building data provider services against the mesh. Teams declared their domain schema and access patterns in a DSL; the template generated a fully-formed, compliant GraphQL service layer.

GitHub Actions Templates

A reusable library of CI/CD workflow templates covering build, test, security scanning and deployment to AKS - eliminating per-team pipeline setup and enforcing consistent quality gates.

Secrets Management

Standardised secrets management integrated into every template - providing a single, auditable pattern for injecting credentials and configuration into workloads, aligned to the client's compliance requirements.

Micro frontend CLI Tooling

A developer CLI for scaffolding new micro frontend applications, enforcing module federation patterns and shared design system integration - so domain teams built consistent, composable UIs without front-end architecture expertise.

Java Service Templates

Production-ready Spring Boot service templates with built-in patterns for structured logging, distributed tracing, health endpoints, and data access - giving backend teams a compliant starting point for domain APIs.

Apollo BFF Templates

Backend-for-Frontend templates using Apollo Server, providing domain-specific API aggregation layers between microfrontends and underlying services - reducing client-side complexity and tailoring data shapes to UI needs.

Outcomes

The data mesh investment realised at the application layer.

The App Builder Platform transformed the relationship between the platform and domain teams - shifting the platform from a constraint into an accelerator.

New applications in hours, not weeks
Teams bootstrapped new domain applications using platform templates and CLI tooling, going from zero to a running, production-ready skeleton in a single day.
Consistent architecture across the estate
Opinionated templates meant all domain applications shared the same structural patterns - making the codebase navigable, reviews faster, and platform-level changes easier to propagate.
Security and compliance by default
Secrets management, security scanning and audit logging were integral to every template - removing the compliance burden from individual teams and ensuring consistent posture across all applications.
Data mesh investment operationalised
The standardised GraphQL data provider template gave every domain a clear, consistent path to exposing and consuming data mesh products at the application layer.
Platform ownership transferred to the client
The client's platform engineering team took full ownership of the templates and tooling. The patterns were extensible by design, so teams could contribute back to the platform.
Work with Starlake

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