"I wish I knew about this a couple years ago..."
Over my seven years as a cofounder, I've heard some version of that line more than any other. Usually, it comes at the end of a demo to someone who has spent a year getting to something not even close to what they're seeing on my screen.
The story is always the same. An organization adopts Kubernetes and arrives at the inevitable conclusion that they need a platform. That they can't just manage clusters as IaC from a command line in this repeatable world of disaster-recoverable GitOps. You need a distribution system of the full platform stack, integrated together and running wherever your business needs to be.
They allocate a couple of their most talented engineers, thinking it will only take a few months, but years later, there is still no consistency in the patterns that are used across various teams, applications, clusters, and cloud boundaries. This is the platform gap Konstruct exists to solve.
In 2025, Civo acquired Konstruct (formerly known as Kubefirst), allowing us to do something about it and build a completely new solution from the ground up.
What is Konstruct?
Konstruct by Civo is a GitOps powered Internal Developer Platform (IDP) that gives you a production grade platform-as-a-service, deployed in minutes. It distributes consistent, self-service control planes to development teams, giving them everything they need to ship without friction.
Skip months of GitOps setup and start with a complete delivery ecosystem on day one, fully defined in your repository for total control and easy customization.
Key benefits of Konstruct
| One-click platform provisioning | Launch a complete, production-ready platform in minutes, drastically cutting time-to-value and accelerating your development cycles from day one |
| Full GitOps ownership | Own your platform from a Git repository you control. This gives you total freedom to inspect, customize, or replace any component with a simple pull request. |
| Cloud and on-premise portability | The same platform runs seamlessly across any public cloud or your on-premise data center, giving you the flexibility to run workloads wherever you choose. |
| Designed for security and compliance | An auditable, open-source platform defined in your Git repository eliminates hidden code, accelerating compliance and simplifying security audits. |
Konstruct’s architecture
Konstruct runs on a three-tier model designed to scale from a startup's first cluster to a Fortune 500's global fleet. Konstruct separates global control, team autonomy, and workloads into three Kubernetes-native layers:
- Konstruct control plane: The brain of the platform. It manages shared configuration such as SSO, cloud accounts, team metadata, and the lifecycle of downstream team management clusters.
- Team management clusters: Isolated control planes per business unit, providing each team with their own GitOps repository space and platform services. Teams operate independently within guardrails defined by the platform team.
- Workload clusters: Lightweight Kubernetes clusters, virtual, physical, or bare metal, where applications actually run. Provisioned on demand and managed entirely through GitOps, with no centralized bottlenecks.
Scale with your organization
This architecture reflects how responsibility naturally evolves in cloud-native organizations. A small team may only operate workload clusters, while a large enterprise may run all three tiers across multiple clouds and data centers. The architecture itself doesn’t change, it simply expands as your needs grow.
Every tier is a Kubernetes cluster running standard CNCF tooling. That means you can inspect, debug, and extend any layer using tools you already know. Control plane, management, and workload clusters can run in any cloud or data center and integrate cleanly into an existing multicloud or hybrid footprint.
Konstruct includes a UI, an API, and Kubernetes-native operators that manage the full platform lifecycle: organizations, cloud and Git accounts, application delivery, SSO, and cluster provisioning. Everything is defined declaratively and reconciled through GitOps. No imperative workflows. No hidden state. No drift.
Creating a new organization is a single operation: Konstruct provisions a management cluster, bootstraps GitOps, wires up secrets, and deploys applications in the correct order, resulting in a ready-to-use, isolated platform environment within minutes.
The integrated stack
When you install and hydrate clusters with GitOps, there are a number of chicken-and-egg scenarios you would have to address. But we've untangled them all, declaratively using ArgoCD sync waves and you'll get that on minute one also. Konstruct doesn't just install these tools for you, it integrates them into a working GitOps platform so you have a place to configure them and keep them transparent and recoverable.
Each layer individually is rock solid, but pre-integrated and tested as a system, they will be able to provide the repeatable, distributable controls that your organization needs.
Konstruct layers
| GitOps engine | ArgoCD manages every resource across every cluster with least-privilege isolation. Declarative, version-controlled, and auditable GitOps gives each team a clear separation between platform-managed and application-managed resources. |
| Infrastructure automation | Provision cloud and infrastructure resources through GitOps using Crossplane, Terraform, or other cloud-native IaC tools. Choose the providers and abstractions that fit your organization without changing the platform model. |
| GitOps catalog | A versioned distribution system for infrastructure and application components. Define once, publish centrally, and reuse consistently across teams and environments. |
| Fleet distribution | Each organization operates its own isolated GitOps repository and cloud account, while sharing standardized platform components. Manage applications across clouds and environments without duplicating platform logic. |
| Defaults and customizations | Opinionated defaults provide a working platform out of the box, while registries at every layer allow you to swap tools, extend workflows, and take on operational responsibility only where it adds business value. |
| Security and secrets | Multi-tenant secrets management with External Secrets Operator. Secrets are sourced from your cloud provider, scoped per team and namespace, with no shared credentials or manual rotations. |
| Networking | Production-ready networking with automatic TLS and DNS using Envoy, cert-manager, and External DNS. Available on day one across public cloud, private cloud, and complex internal topologies. |
| CI/CD | Bring your existing CI system or use generated defaults. Register an application repository and Konstruct creates Helm charts, GitOps configuration, and environment-aware deployment workflows. |
| Developer experience | Self-service application delivery with golden paths to production. Developers deploy to any environment without needing to understand clusters, infrastructure, or platform internals. |
Multicloud, hybrid, data center portability
Konstruct ships with prebuilt templates for Civo, AWS, and GCP, and works with both GitHub and GitLab. Your choice of cloud and git providers are interchangable on your new platform.
But the vision goes further than supporting multiple clouds. Through Colony, Civo’s bare metal autodiscovery and Kubernetes provisioning system, Konstruct extends the same platform model to on-premise infrastructure running K3s, Talos, or Civo Stack Enterprise. The same GitOps workflows, developer experience, and self-service provisioning apply, now on hardware you own. For organizations with data residency requirements, regulatory constraints, or a clear economic case for owning compute, this unlocks a consistent operating model across environments.
Public cloud. Private cloud. Bare metal. One GitOps platform.
Real portability isn’t just claiming multicloud support, it’s making portability operational. With Konstruct, your platform definitions, configurations, templates, and workflows live in Git and run anywhere Kubernetes runs. You can deploy development environments on Civo, production workloads on AWS, and regulated systems on bare metal in your own data center, all managed through the same GitOps workflows, templates, and control plane.
What does this means for your team?
| For platform engineers | The integration work that consumes your first six to twelve months is done. Extend the platform with what's unique to your organization - custom cluster templates, specialized pipelines, domain-specific tooling, your own Terraform modules. Build what only you can build and plug it in. |
| For engineering leaders | Return on investment from day one. A GitOps audit trail across every cluster for compliance. Standardized tooling that reduces hero-dependency and knowledge concentration. Everything runs on CNCF-standard tooling, so you're never locked into a proprietary ecosystem. You keep the controls to change everything, including walking away from us. |
| For developers | Self-service provisioning. Simple golden paths to production. Register an app repo and ship to any environment from your favorite CI system. No handoffs. No waiting. No need to understand the underlying infrastructure, just environment names, your code, and your best delivery opinions. |
Try Konstruct today
We've spent seven years listening to thousands of platform engineers across financial services, automotive, healthcare, SaaS, government, and more. The patterns are always the same. Konstruct lets you manage your snowflakes at an enterprise scale and lets you grow into whatever it is that you're ready for with your platform.
Get started with Konstruct
Find out how Konstruct gives you an Internal Developer Platform with a production grade platform-as-a-service, deployed in minutes, fully owned and operated by you, on any cloud infrastructure.
Find out more at www.civo.com/konstruct >
