- Day-one production hardening: Our immediate task was to secure the production system, because the first enterprise client of LegalTech Startup was going live. We replaced the manual "SCP-style" deployments and hardened the infrastructure on a still-maturing Google Cloud Platform, establishing the baseline reliability needed to pass enterprise scrutiny.
- Cost-effective CI/CD pipeline: We built a full CI/CD pipeline from scratch using a self-hosted GitLab instance. This strategic recommendation saved the client a high cost over paid alternatives like Jenkins. Besides, it fully automated their build and deploy process, allowing their developers to focus exclusively on shipping, not maintenance.
Legal Tech Startup
GCP foundation for an AI-powered LegalTech startup
What to do when you need a DevOps pro, but cannot afford a full-time hire, and don't have enough workload? And even if you could, they'd be forced to wear too many hats, because your business requires a compliant setup now, while your team is focused on shipping.

Enabling Enterprise-grade technology sales
With a small engineering team and a mission to land enterprise clients, LegalTech startup faced a classic startup dilemma: building a secure, scalable infrastructure was non-negotiable, but hiring a full-time DevOps expert was over budget and would divert focus from the core product.
Quick facts
LegalTech
AI-Powered LegalTech Platform
Our client operates an AI-driven platform that streamlines legal case preparation for users in the USA. As a startup, they began their journey 8 years ago, focusing 100% on product development to quickly win over enterprise clients.
Right‑sizing and autoscaling done right
By tuning requests/limits, enabling VPA where safe, and tightening node‑pool autoscaling, we cut idle capacity and bin‑pack workloads. We achieved a 28% reduction in cluster spend while maintaining SLOs and deployment velocity.
The best couple Terraform + GCP
The initial system was manual and not hardened. We built their foundational infrastructure on GCP by utilizing an infrastructure-as-code approach — a strategic recommendation that saved the client time on disaster recovery.
"ITsyndicate engineers always think about those things that I'm not necessarily thinking about - and I like that advice. I like that pushback... That's really much more of a partnership than me just dictating what I want, and they just executing."
James
CTO, LegalTech Startup
What we did for LegalTech startup
Production hardening and CI/CD automation
24/7 SRE and Proactive Monitoring
- Predictability through observability: To deliver the "reliable, dependable systems" the CTO needed to sleep well at night, we deployed a full monitoring stack using Prometheus and Grafana. This provided deep visibility into system health and performance metrics.
- Proactive incident response: Our 24/7 SRE team uses the real-time alerting from the monitoring stack to ensure high availability. This allows us to detect and resolve most issues before they can impact the development workflow or end-users.
Strategic partnership and consulting
- Proactive Technical Guidance: Beyond execution, we act as a strategic partner. We proactively recommend new technologies and solutions to benefit our clients' business and continue to suggest architectural improvements to future-proof the platform.
- Protective Pushback: We provide what the client calls "a consulting value that doesn't allow them to make errors." This involves actively pushing back on client requests that could compromise the platform's security, compliance, or long-term stability, ensuring best practices are always followed.
Enterprise-grade cloud setup: FAQ
It means your security controls are not just theoretical but are automated, auditable, and continuously monitored. That's why we treat compliance as an engineering problem, not a paperwork exercise.
Our process involves mapping your infrastructure and CI/CD controls to the SOC 2 Common Criteria and automating the collection of evidence—like configurations and runbooks—from version control. This results in a continuously updated evidence catalog ready for auditors, with no last-minute manual effort.
We eliminate standing admin privileges entirely and replace them with a Just-in-Time (JIT) access model. This ensures no one has persistent, high-level access to production environments.
Access is granted for a time-bound window, requires approval, and is programmatically tied to a specific change or incident ID. All elevation events are logged for review, resulting in zero persistent production admins and a fully auditable access trail.
By building automated quality gates directly into the CI/CD pipeline. No deployment can be promoted to the next environment without passing a series of automated, non-negotiable checks.
Our GitLab pipelines integrate unit and integration tests, container vulnerability scanning, and post-deployment smoke tests. A "green check" is required at each stage before code can move from development to staging, and finally to production, ensuring a change failure rate of less than 10%.
No. A backup is a component; a DR plan is a documented, tested, and proven process for restoring service within a specific timeframe.
Our process includes defining clear Recovery Point Objectives (RPO) and Recovery Time Objectives (RTO). We use Terraform to define the infrastructure re-provisioning process as code and conduct semi-annual DR drills to validate the entire plan. This ensures we can meet our RTO of 2 hours and provides a clear, actionable playbook for any critical failure event.
Through a combination of proactive governance and continuous optimization. We establish a FinOps practice from day one to ensure costs remain predictable and aligned with business value.
This involves setting budgets with automated alerts, implementing resource labeling for chargeback, and tuning GKE node pools and autoscaling configurations. A monthly FinOps review allows us to rightsize resources and plan for reservations where applicable, resulting in 12-20% cost avoidance versus forecast and a stable spending profile.

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