Scaling GitOps Without Scaling the Team: How Cowbell Runs Hundreds of Apps on Akuity
Cowbell reduced GitOps overhead and improved incident response with Akuity and Akuity Intelligence.

Industry:
InsurTech
Company size:
201-500
Location:
50–55% Reduction
Less SRE time spent responding to deployment failures
4 Clusters in 1 Day
Production GitOps environments connected and ready to deploy
Company Overview
Cowbell is the commercial insurance partner that makes brokers more successful by delivering coverage clients can actually understand and protection that strengthens their business. Cowbell is running hundreds of applications across multiple Kubernetes clusters and regions. The Site Reliability Engineering team is responsible for the full delivery lifecycle, from GitHub through production, including CI/CD pipelines, deployments, reliability, and customer-facing service health.
Why Cowbell Chose Akuity
As GitOps became critical to Cowbell’s delivery pipeline, self-managing Argo CD at scale created growing operational overhead. Cowbell chose Akuity to offload Argo CD operations, reduce upgrade and maintenance risk, and centralize GitOps across hundreds of applications. Akuity and Akuity Intelligence improved visibility into deployments and incidents, allowing the SRE team to focus on business value instead of platform upkeep.
The Challenge
Cowbell adopted open-source Argo CD early and found it effective at smaller scale. Over time, however, the company grew to hundreds of applications across multiple clusters and regions, and GitOps itself became a source of operational complexity.
For a lean SRE team, self-managing Argo CD at this scale introduced several challenges:
Increasing customization and expertise required to operate Argo CD reliably
High maintenance and upgrade risk competing with product delivery priorities
Significant time spent debugging failed deployments
Limited developer self-service for understanding deployment issues
“We were spending somewhere around 50 to 55 percent of our time answering, ‘Why did my deployment fail?’” — Yousef Alam, Sr Staff Engineer at Cowbell
With GitOps on the critical path for delivery, Cowbell needed a solution that could scale without pulling SREs away from reliability and business impact.
The Solution
A managed GitOps platform designed for scale
Cowbell chose Akuity to offload the operational responsibility of running Argo CD at scale while preserving existing GitOps workflows.
Proven scalability from the creators of Argo CD
Cowbell had confidence that the scaling challenges they faced were well understood and already addressed by the team behind Argo CD.
“In talking with the folks at Akuity, it was very much like, ‘Yes, we know this problem, and we’ve already solved it.’ That’s exactly what you want to hear when GitOps is critical infrastructure.” — Yousef Alam, Sr Staff Engineer at Cowbell
Fast, low-friction onboarding
Clusters were connected quickly without complex networking or custom architecture, allowing the team to start deploying immediately.
“We connected four clusters within a day. It was completely frictionless and got us to a place where we could start shipping right away.” - Yousef Alam, Sr Staff Engineer at Cowbell
Application-level insight with Akuity Intelligence.
Akuity Intelligence extended GitOps visibility by detecting degraded application state directly from Argo CD and delivery pipelines, without introducing additional dashboards or tooling.
The Result
Faster incident response, clearer visibility, and more time for reliability
After moving to Akuity, Cowbell reduced the operational load associated with running GitOps at scale and improved how quickly the team could understand and respond to issues.
With Akuity Intelligence, the team was able to detect degraded application state earlier by leveraging GitOps data directly, rather than relying solely on traditional monitoring signals.
“Akuity Intelligence can actually catch incidents faster than our existing monitoring because Argo CD already knows the exact state.”
This improved visibility also helped surface issues that had previously gone unnoticed, increasing confidence in production awareness.
“Akuity Intelligence caught something we didn’t realize had been broken for a while.”
“It stopped being infrastructure and operations work and became focused on site reliability engineering.”
Scaling GitOps Without Added Overhead
With Akuity and Akuity Intelligence, Cowbell scaled GitOps across hundreds of applications, reduced operational burden, and improved incident visibility without increasing the SRE team.
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