Roark Capital: Streamlining Application Deployment and Accelerating Developer Success with GKE Autopilot

About Roark Capital

Roark Capital is an Atlanta-based private equity firm with over $40 billion in assets under management, focused on investments in consumer and business service companies, with a specialization in franchise and franchise-like business models. As a firm managing a large portfolio of brands and digital platforms, Roark’s internal development teams rely on modern infrastructure to support secure, reliable, and scalable application delivery.

As their application ecosystem grew, Roark faced mounting challenges with deployment reliability and scalability—especially around their data visualization tools and internal applications that were running on Cloud Run.

The Challenge

Roark’s teams were encountering frequent out-of-memory errors and unpredictable application performance on Cloud Run. Their deployment model was fragile, requiring manual interventions and repeated troubleshooting. The lack of a scalable, consistent deployment framework slowed down developer velocity and made onboarding new teams more difficult.

The engineering organization needed a cost-effective Kubernetes solution that:

• Eliminated reliability issues and flakey deployments
  
• Simplified cluster management for new and existing teams
  
• Provided secure, identity-aware access via Keycloak
  
• Enabled a more repeatable and automated deployment workflow
  
  

These pain points reflected a common pre-platform engineering challenge: developers wanted to move faster, but lacked the guardrails, automation, and self-service capabilities needed to do so safely.

The Solution

Roark partnered with Tensure Consulting to design and implement a modern, platform-aligned Kubernetes environment built for reliability, scalability, and developer self-service.

The engagement included three key components:

1. Migration to GKE Autopilot
   Tensure migrated Roark’s containerized workloads from Cloud Run to Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) Autopilot, solving persistent memory issues and introducing automated scaling and cost optimization. Autopilot’s fully managed nature reduced operational overhead, allowing Roark’s teams to focus on development instead of cluster tuning.
   
   
2. Secure Access with Keycloak Integration
   To ensure seamless and secure authentication across applications, Tensure integrated Keycloak with GKE for identity-aware access control. This gave teams fine-grained permissions while maintaining a centralized security posture.
   
   
3. GitOps Enablement with ArgoCD
   Tensure implemented an ArgoCD-based GitOps pipeline to automate deployments, manage cluster configurations, and establish clear patterns for application onboarding. This introduced consistency and repeatability across environments, reducing human error and improving developer confidence.
   
   

The Results

Through this engagement, Roark transitioned from a crash-prone, manual deployment model to a stable, automated, and scalable platform that supports faster and more reliable software delivery.

Key outcomes included:

• Streamlined application deployment so that developers could be successful more quickly
  
• Eliminated flakey, crash-prone deployments, delivering a solid foundation for their data visualization and internal tools
  
• Simplified Kubernetes adoption via GKE Autopilot, enabling new teams to onboard easily without deep Kubernetes expertise
  
• Secure, repeatable deployments with centralized identity management through Keycloak
  
• Improved developer confidence and platform scalability, enabling future growth across the Roark ecosystem
  
  

While exact metrics were not tracked, the transformation represented a significant leap in reliability and efficiency—helping Roark’s developers ship applications faster and with greater confidence.

Platform Engineering in Practice

This project exemplified the core tenets of platform engineering: standardization, automation, and self-service. By adopting a GitOps-driven model and leveraging GKE Autopilot, Roark reduced cognitive load for developers and established a foundation for future platform growth.

Tensure’s approach ensured the new platform wasn’t just technically sound—it was usable and scalable by design. Developers could now focus on delivering business value, not firefighting infrastructure issues.

The Impact

Roark now operates with greater speed, reliability, and security across its internal application landscape. What was once a fragile and crash-prone system is now a stable, modern platform supporting consistent, repeatable deployments.

“Tensure provided us with smooth onboarding to run our applications in GKE and gave us patterns that we can use to scale out as needed.”
— Ben Johnson, Roark Capital

At a Glance