Private Sector  ·  Platform Engineering

Remote Development
Workspaces at Scale

Eliminating developer environment divergence for a private sector organisation - significantly reducing onboarding time and rollout of environment updates, whilst enforcing consistent security compliance across the engineering estate.

Sector
Private Sector
Capability
star:platform
Technology
Coder, Kubernetes, Terraform
Constraint
Private Infrastructure
The Challenge

Ungoverned environments were slowing everything down.

The organisation's engineering teams had grown organically, with each developer managing their own local toolchain. What began as flexibility had become a liability.

Environment divergence had reached a point where issues were routinely reproduced on one machine but not another. Onboarding new engineers required days of guided setup, and the security team had no reliable way to assert that developer workstations met compliance standards.

The organisation had clear requirements: environments must remain entirely on private infrastructure. Cloud-hosted workspaces were not an option.

Pain Points

Slow onboarding
New developers spent over 72 hours reaching a productive environment, requiring significant senior engineer time to support.
No compliance assurance
Security tooling, policies and approved versions could not be enforced across developer machines - creating audit risk and compliance gaps.
Environment-driven defects
Divergent configurations produced hard-to-reproduce bugs and consumed significant engineering time in triage.
High maintenance overhead
Rolling out tool or dependency updates required manual coordination across every developer machine with no reliable verification.
The Solution

Remote workspaces on private infrastructure.

Starlake designed and delivered a pilot implementation of Coder Workspaces, deployed within the client's own Kubernetes infrastructure - providing a consistent, governed, fully private development environment.

Workspace Templates as Code

Every developer environment defined in Terraform and versioned in source control - ensuring complete consistency and auditability.

Kubernetes Backend

Developer workloads run as Kubernetes pods on the client's existing private cluster - no new infrastructure footprint required.

Familiar Local Experience

VS Code Remote and JetBrains Gateway integration means developers work in their preferred IDE with remote execution - no workflow disruption.

Enforced Compliance

Security policies, approved tooling and RBAC enforced at the template and Kubernetes network policy level - auditable by default.

High-Level Architecture

Coder Workspaces architecture: Platform Team pushes templates to Coder Server inside a private Kubernetes cluster, which provisions one namespace per developer containing workspace, database and services pods.
Results

Measurable outcomes from the pilot.

The following metrics were recorded against targets established at the outset of the engagement.

Developer Onboarding
72+ hours
~1 hour
98% reduction
Environment Update Time
2-3 days
<10 min
99% reduction
Security Compliance Score
~47%
96%
49% improvement
Env-related Support Tickets
34 / month
<1 / month
97% reduction
Time to First Commit
8 days
4 hours
97% reduction
Maintenance Overhead
£300k/year
£15k/year
£285k saving
What Changed

Beyond the numbers.

The impact of the pilot extended well beyond onboarding time. The engineering team gained confidence in their environments, and the security function gained a new level of assurance over the development estate.

Discuss your challenge
Governance by default
Every workspace is provisioned from a versioned, reviewed template. Compliance is structural rather than procedural.
Reproducible environments
"Works on my machine" ceased to be a valid statement. All developers work from identical, defined configurations.
Instant rollout of updates
Tool upgrades, dependency patches and policy changes propagate to all workspaces in minutes - with no manual coordination required.
Private infrastructure, fully met
All compute, storage and network traffic remains within the client's private estate. No dependency on external cloud services.
Capability transfer throughout
The client's platform team now owns and operates the Coder infrastructure independently. No ongoing Starlake dependency.
Work with Starlake

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