How Nimbbl Empowered 40 Engineers to Self-Manage Kubernetes Environments with Atmosly

How Nimbbl Empowered 40 Engineers to Self-Manage Kubernetes Environments with Atmosly

About Nimbbl

Nimbbl is a checkout platform that aggregates multiple payment gateways into a single, unified checkout experience. By routing transactions intelligently across payment providers, Nimbbl helps merchants maximise payment success rates while delivering a seamless checkout flow to end users.

With a 40-person engineering team and a product that sits in the critical path of online payments, Nimbbl operates with zero tolerance for downtime. Every deployment, every environment change, and every pipeline run has to be reliable and predictable.

The Challenge

As Nimbbl's engineering team grew, so did the operational overhead of managing Kubernetes environments. The problems were familiar but urgent:

• Non-prod environment bottleneck -- developers needed access to staging, QA, and dev environments for testing, but provisioning and managing these environments was gated through a small infrastructure team.
• Inconsistent deployments -- without a standardised process, teams deployed differently across environments, leading to configuration drift and hard-to-reproduce bugs.
• Environment variable sprawl -- managing secrets and environment variables across multiple services and environments was manual, error-prone, and a security risk.
• Idle environment costs -- non-production environments running 24/7 when developers only needed them during working hours was burning cloud budget unnecessarily.

Why Atmosly

Nimbbl needed a platform that could give their 40 engineers self-service access to Kubernetes environments without compromising security or creating operational chaos. The infrastructure team needed to stay in control of production while enabling developers to independently manage non-prod environments.

Atmosly provided the right balance: a DevOps automation platform that gives developers self-service capabilities within guardrails set by the platform team.

Solution: Atmosly on AWS EKS

1. Self-Service Non-Prod Environments:
   • Atmosly gave every developer the ability to spin up, manage, and tear down non-production environments on their own -- no tickets, no waiting on the infrastructure team.
   • Role-based access controls ensured developers could only access environments they owned, keeping production isolated and secure.
   • This eliminated the environment bottleneck that was slowing down feature development and QA cycles.
2. Auto-Start and Auto-Stop Environments:
   • Atmosly's environment scheduling automatically shuts down non-prod environments outside working hours and starts them up when developers need them.
   • This cut Nimbbl's non-production cloud costs significantly -- no more paying for idle dev and staging clusters running overnight and on weekends.
3. Standardised CI/CD with Pipeline Builder:
   • Atmosly's pipeline builder became the single way to build and deploy across all environments.
   • Every team follows the same pipeline templates -- build, test, scan, deploy -- ensuring consistency from dev through to production.
   • Developers execute pipelines themselves with full visibility into build logs, deployment status, and rollback options.
   • Daily deployments happen reliably without infrastructure team involvement.
4. Centralised Environment Variable Management:
   • Atmosly's environment variable management replaced the patchwork of manually maintained config files and ad-hoc secret sharing.
   • Variables are scoped per environment and service, with audit trails and access controls -- critical for a payments company handling sensitive configuration.
   • Developers can view and update variables for their environments without needing access to the underlying Kubernetes cluster.

Results

• 40 engineers self-managing environments -- developers provision, deploy, and manage non-prod environments independently, without DevOps gatekeeping.
• Daily deployments across teams -- standardised pipelines mean every team ships consistently and reliably.
• Reduced non-prod cloud costs -- auto-start/stop eliminated idle environment spend outside working hours.
• Secure self-service -- role-based access and centralised variable management gave developers freedom without compromising security.
• Infrastructure team unblocked -- the platform team shifted from handling environment requests to focusing on reliability and scale.

Conclusion

For a payments platform where uptime is non-negotiable, Nimbbl needed their infrastructure workflow to be as reliable as their checkout flow. Atmosly gave their 40-person engineering team the tools to move fast -- self-service environments, standardised pipelines, and secure configuration management -- while keeping the infrastructure team focused on what matters: keeping production rock-solid for millions of transactions.