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Choose Your Implementation Path

Fawkes is designed to meet teams where they are. Whether you are standing up a new platform from scratch, migrating from a legacy setup, or incrementally improving an existing delivery pipeline, there is an implementation path for you.

Path A: Greenfield Platform

Best for: New projects, teams starting fresh, organisations standing up a new engineering platform.

You will build the full Fawkes stack from day one:

  1. Provision infrastructure — Run scripts/ignite.sh to provision a Kubernetes cluster (AKS or EKS) using the Terraform modules in infra/.

  2. Bootstrap the platform — ArgoCD, cert-manager, External Secrets Operator, and Kyverno are installed via the bootstrap Helm chart.

  3. Deploy platform components — Backstage, Jenkins, Prometheus/Grafana, DevLake, and Vault are deployed as ArgoCD Applications from platform/apps/.

  4. Onboard your first service — Use the Backstage golden-path template to scaffold and deploy your first microservice. Follow Tutorial 1.

Typical timeline: 2–4 weeks to full platform, 1–2 weeks per service onboarded.

Path B: Brownfield Migration

Best for: Existing organisations with legacy CI/CD (e.g., Jenkins on VMs, manual deployments), wanting to adopt GitOps and improve DORA metrics without a big-bang rewrite.

Work incrementally:

  1. Containerise one service — Pick a low-risk service and build a Docker image. Get it deploying to Kubernetes. Do not containerise everything at once.

  2. Add CI — Connect the service to the Jenkins shared library or GitHub Actions. Add a linting and test stage. Establish a coverage baseline.

  3. Add GitOps — Deploy the service via ArgoCD from a Helm chart. This replaces your existing manual deployment step.

  4. Add observability — Add a Prometheus /metrics endpoint and a Grafana dashboard. Set an alert on the error rate.

  5. Repeat — Onboard the next service using the same pattern.

Typical timeline: 1–2 sprints per service; full migration of 10 services in 3–6 months.

Path C: Incremental Adoption

Best for: Teams that already have Kubernetes and CI/CD but want to add DORA measurement, better observability, security gates, or a developer portal.

Pick the capability area you want to improve:

Goal Starting Point
Measure DORA metrics DevLake + Grafana setup
Developer portal Backstage onboarding
Security gates Quality gates configuration
GitOps Onboard service to ArgoCD
Secrets management Rotate Vault secrets

Next Steps

See Also