How ControlUp Scaled Kubernetes Adoption and Removed DevOps Bottlenecks with Komodor

About ControlUp

ControlUp is a leader in Digital Employee Experience (DEX), unifying DEX and IT operations within a single platform built for modern workplace management. By combining real-time monitoring, intelligent insights, agentic AI, and automated remediation, ControlUp is evolving IT from reactive issue resolution to proactive, autonomous operations and accelerating the shift toward Autonomous Endpoint Management (AEM).

ControlUp helps IT teams resolve issues before they impact employees, reduce operational complexity, and scale efficiently without relying on fragmented toolsets. The result: IT stays ahead, employees thrive, and a digital workspace that runs autonomously at scale.

The Challenge: Scaling Kubernetes Without Creating a DevOps Bottleneck

As ControlUp executed a significant scale-up and transitioned the majority of its workloads to Kubernetes, the organization encountered a challenge many others have faced: Kubernetes expertise was heavily centralized within the DevOps team.

While the move to Kubernetes enabled faster innovation and greater flexibility, it also introduced new friction:

• Expertise Silo: Kubernetes knowledge was largely limited to DevOps, requiring their involvement in even routine debugging and troubleshooting activities.

• Rapid Scaling and Complexity: The simultaneous expansion of Kubernetes clusters across AWS and Azure, coupled with the integration of developers from legacy platforms (e.g., Windows IIS) with limited experience in Docker, Helm, and core Kubernetes concepts, placed an unsustainable burden on the DevOps team.

• Ineffective Knowledge Transfer: One-off training sessions struggled to create lasting proficiency, created retention concerns, and many developers were hesitant to adopt Command Line Interface (CLI) workflows.

• Operational Drag: The DevOps team was heavily engaged in repetitive, low-value activities, primarily consisting of “explaining K8s troubleshooting to developers” and resolving a continuous influx of foundational issues.

ControlUp needed an approach that distributed Kubernetes operational understanding across R&D teams, without slowing development velocity or increasing risk.

The Approach: Democratizing Kubernetes Operations at Scale via Komodor

ControlUp’s objective was clear:

Enable developers to independently inspect, understand, and troubleshoot Kubernetes workloads without requiring intervention from a DevOps engineer.

Rather than expanding headcount or over-indexing on additional training, ControlUp focused on restructuring how Kubernetes visibility and operational context were shared across teams.

Komodor was selected to support this strategy because of its ability to provide a unified, visual, AI-powered platform that makes Kubernetes operations more accessible, contextual, and action-oriented for non-experts.

Key elements of the approach included:

• Intuitive Visual Troubleshooting: Komodor provided a highly accessible User Interface (UI) that streamlined investigation and remediation. By allowing developers to reason about Kubernetes behaviour without relying on deep CLI experience, it offered a significant functional advantage over alternative tools.

• Centralized Contextual Data: The platform proved instrumental in aggregating disparate operational data, including Splunk logs, Git commits, and Jenkins jobs, into a single, consolidated view using “external links” and annotations. This provided developers with a comprehensive service timeline and deployment history.

• Process-Driven Adoption: To effectively reinforce independent ownership, ControlUp’s DevOps team restructured the incident ticketing process. Developers were required to document findings and investigation steps in Komodor before escalating issues to DevOps. This positioned the tool as the default first step for Kubernetes troubleshooting, not an optional add-on.

• Phased Empowerment: Developer privileges were expanded in phases. Initial access focused on observability and read-only actions, with more powerful operational capabilities (e.g., scale, rollback, delete) being gradually enabled within the development and Quality Assurance (QA) environments. This approach balanced empowerment with operational safety while building confidence and trust within the R&D teams.

The Results: A Scalable Operating Model for Kubernetes

The deployment of Komodor created a fundamental and transformative shift in how ControlUp operates Kubernetes at scale, repositioning the platform from a discretionary asset to one that reduces friction, improves accountability, and preserves DevOps capacity for higher-impact work.

• Significant Time Reclamation for DevOps: The DevOps team is now far less involved in routine troubleshooting and developer “handholding,” freeing time to concentrate on strategic infrastructure and platform initiatives.

• Accelerated Issue Resolution: Teams resolve incidents more quickly and with greater confidence, directly translating into enhanced business value and a measurable reduction in service downtime.

• Developer Empowerment and Ownership: Developers troubleshoot with greater confidence and take a more “holistic approach” to problem-solving. They now report issues with more context, which facilitates more productive collaboration when escalation is unavoidable, and DevOps engagement is needed.

• Enabling Growth: The platform was dubbed a must-have, with the operating model now supporting ControlUp’s growth trajectory without requiring a proportional increase in DevOps involvement. The DevOps team has expressed so, saying, “The pace here doesn’t work without Komodor.”
• High Internal Adoption: Komodor has achieved a high internal adoption rate, recording 60-70 monthly active users among the R&D teams.