The story behind Konstruct: Lessons learned scaling GitOps

In 2024, Civo acquired Konstruct (formerly Kubefirst) to reinforce our commitment to simplifying cloud computing complexities. When this acquisition was made, it began a whole new chapter for the team behind Konstruct.

Over the years, we assembled our team by working with a community of thousands of engineers in what can be a very complex cloud native environment. We were fortunate to join forces with Civo as they aligned with our cloud native and portable vision. Our teams are now woven into a single, yaml-stitched fiber, and many of the incredible folks who have built our platforms for years are now building key pieces of the cloud that will soon be hosting some of our upcoming Konstruct components.

This same relentless team that has passionately tackled cloud native adoption for the last seven years is now vastly stronger and fully fueled for the remainder of our mission as Civo. It’s beyond exciting to share our vision for cloud native platforms with you.

The history of Kubefirst: Distributing GitOps

With more than 2,000 GitHub stars and a community that loved the fast, open source declarative patterns, Kubefirst was a great repeatable GitOps platform. Despite its strengths, Kubefirst faced some limitations. Distribution and upgrades were difficult, and the boundary between what end users could safely change and what the platform owned was often unclear. The model assumed a narrow scope, management and workload clusters only, with no strong upstream abstractions for multitenancy or fleet-wide distribution.

More fundamentally, Kubefirst lacked first-class domain objects as Kubernetes resources. Cloud accounts, Git providers, teams, SSO configurations, workload clusters, application repositories, and catalog items are not just configurations; they are core primitives for operating fleets at scale. As such, they deserve to be Kubernetes-native resources with explicit lifecycles and reconciliation. Kubefirst treated these concerns as static configuration rather than durable domain concepts.

This raised a harder question: how do you take a great single-team GitOps pattern and repeat it across fifty teams, each with different isolation boundaries, cloud accounts, and repositories, without collapsing under operational complexity? How do you provide guardrails for highly customized, “snowflake” organizations at enterprise scale, while still keeping the experience simple enough for a single application team just getting started with Kubernetes?

Building a solution: Introducing Konstruct

After considering these questions, Konstruct was built with isolation and enterprise distribution from the ground up, helping the product to better align with Civo’s vision of opening up a true multi-cloud future.

Konstruct was designed for large enterprises distributing platforms to tens of thousands of engineers, where each business unit effectively operates as its own company. In these environments, the real challenge isn’t creating best practices; it’s consistently distributing and enforcing them across the organization. Konstruct addresses this by giving platform teams explicit control over how their opinions are modeled and rolled out, while offering the flexibility to self-host or run components as a managed service.

Control plane

The control plane provides the upstream layer platform engineering teams need to distribute full internal developer platforms. It manages global configuration such as SSO, cloud accounts, and team lifecycle, while enforcing isolation by default. Each team receives its own management cluster with dedicated Argo CD, GitOps repositories, infrastructure-as-code, and secrets boundaries. Lightweight workload clusters run applications. Control plane, management, and workload clusters are distinct, composable Kubernetes types built on familiar CNCF tooling.

Konstruct operators

Core organizational and application concerns, cloud accounts, Git providers, teams, SSO, workload clusters, application repositories, and catalog items are modeled as first-class Kubernetes resources. Each is managed by its own operator and CRDs, providing declarative, reconciled, and self-healing domain primitives for operating platforms at scale.

Operate only what you need

Konstruct’s architecture lets you choose which layers to operate and which to consume as a service. Run the control plane yourself when compliance requires it. Self-host management clusters to meet data residency constraints. Or offload operational overhead until you’re ready to take ownership. The architecture remains constant; you simply decide where responsibility lives.

Simple hosting wherever your cloud is

Civo delivers managed Kubernetes with the speed and simplicity the community expects, whether in the public cloud or deployed privately for organizations with stricter requirements. The same cloud experience can run on infrastructure you own, with Colony repurposing bare-metal hardware through autodiscovery and supercluster provisioning. Konstruct unifies these environments with a consistent platform layer that runs the same way across managed clouds, hyperscalers, and bare metal.

Together, Civo, Colony, and Konstruct provide a complete, portable infrastructure stack. Public cloud or private cloud. Your hardware or ours. Virtualized or bare metal. One platform experience, deployed wherever your cloud happens to be.

Join our mission

Konstruct makes your platform distributable, multi-tenant, and portable, allowing you to protect your business from the future. Civo abstracts you from the complexity until you need to own it.

If you are interested in a demo of the Konstruct platform or talking to someone about our enterprise scalability, schedule time with me here. Or learn more about Konstruct in our latest blog post by clicking here.

👉 Click here to learn more about Konstruct via our documentation