CoreWeave cut customer onboarding from three days to under an hour

Running co-managed GitOps for thousands of applications, with near-zero deployment failures.

Try Akuity

Industry:

Cloud Infrastructure / High-Performance Computing (HPC)

Company size:

Enterprise

Location:

New Jersey, USA

Akuity Product(s):

Enterprise GitOps Platform (Deploy & Promote)
Co-Managed GitOps (Customer Environments)

3 Days -> 1 Hour

Onboarding time reduced per customer

Thousands

Of monthly deployments with near-zero failures

The company

CoreWeave is a GPU cloud built for AI workloads, running natively on Kubernetes with the latest NVIDIA hardware. As demand scaled, so did the number of customer environments its solution architects had to stand up and support — and the way they were provisioning those environments started to break down.

How CoreWeave uses Akuity

CoreWeave uses Akuity to provision and run co-managed GitOps environments for its customers. An automated bootstrap stands up each environment in under an hour, AppSets keep them consistent, and the agent-based model lets CoreWeave manage them without exposing customer networks.

Setting up every customer by hand

CoreWeave's solution architects set up each customer on open-source Argo CD by hand. A single environment took two to three days, and no two were configured the same way. That inconsistency slowed down every support conversation, because the team couldn't assume how a given customer's setup was wired.

Security made it harder. Co-managed access meant CoreWeave had to make changes inside customer environments without exposing customer networks or opening their firewalls, and with a record of every change. Open-source Argo CD couldn't do that at the speed CoreWeave was growing.

“We would have had to change our support model entirely — co-managed GitOps at this growth rate just wouldn't have scaled with OSS.” - Jacob Feldman, Head of Solution Architecture, CoreWeave

What they built with Akuity

Automated onboarding

CoreWeave moved to Akuity's enterprise platform, an agent-based version of Argo CD from its original creators, and replaced the manual setup with a CI-driven bootstrap built on Argo Workflows. One manifest now provisions the CKS clusters, the Argo CD instance, authentication, and base configuration. A complete environment is ready for the customer in under an hour, with a target of 10 to 15 minutes.

Consistency across environments

Akuity’s AppSets pattern keep every environment consistent. The team can replicate a deployment across staging, production, or multiple clusters from one config file. CoreWeave also built an internal tool, synker, that pulls configuration out of customer repos into one place, which cut triage time.

Security and accountability by design

The Akuity Agent runs inside each cluster and connects out to the control plane, so CoreWeave never exposes public services or changes a customer's firewall. Every action is logged, and change notifications give both teams a record of who changed what. When a misconfiguration shows up, it traces back to its source.

Provisioning and daily operations

The platform provisions through the REST API, a Crossplane provider, or Terraform, so CoreWeave can match whatever infrastructure pattern a customer already runs. For daily work, Insights Dashboards give solution architects multi-cluster visibility and let them inspect applications inline, so they don't switch tools to answer one question. Customers work alongside the team in a shared GitHub repo through pull requests. They keep full visibility into their environment while CoreWeave handles the configuration.

The Results

Onboarding time reduced from days to under an hour

Onboarding dropped from two or three days to about an hour. CoreWeave started 2024 with five control planes and 100 applications. It now runs more than 1,500 applications and processes thousands of deployments a month with near-zero failures. The same small team supports far more customers than the manual setup could have, and CoreWeave never had to rebuild its support model to do it.

“At our scale, I don’t think about it. It just runs.” - Jacob Feldman, CoreWeave

A two-person setup job became a one-hour automated one, and it held up as CoreWeave went from 100 applications to more than 1,500.