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Case study

Laurel Scales Global Deployments and Developer Velocity with Akuity’s Managed GitOps Platform

From open-source Argo CD to Akuity: Mastery Modernizes GitOps at 40,000-App Scale

From Unpredictable Terraform Pipelines to Confident, High-Velocity GitOps

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Industry:

Legal Tech

Company size:

Mid-Market

Location:

San Francisco, CA

< 1 WEEK

Akuity fully operational across clusters and regions

THOUSANDS

Of monthly deployments driven by confident GitOps workflows

Company Overview

Laurel is the world’s first AI Time platform for professional services firms. Its AI-powered products transform how organizations track, analyze, and optimize their most valuable resource: time. By automating work time and connecting it to business outcomes, Laurel helps firms increase profitability, improve client delivery, and make data-driven decisions. Founded in 2018, the company serves many of the world’s largest accounting, consulting, and law firms.

Why Laurel Chose Akuity

Laurel needed to be able to streamline and scale its GitOps workflows across multiple regions and environments. Unlike other Managed Argo CD offerings, Akuity’s hybrid, agent-based architecture is designed to support multi-cluster and multi-region deployments and is 100X more scalable than open source Argo CD.

Additionally, with the control plane hosted in Akuity’s cloud and lightweight agents operating inside each cluster. This model provides strong isolation and removes the need for inbound network access, providing better security and consistent performance at scale, making it a solid fit for Laurel’s expanding footprint.

With Akuity’s managed Argo CD platform, the team benefits from consistent deployments, clear operational visibility, and a reliable Git-native workflow, all without the overhead of managing Argo CD internally.

The Challenge

A rapidly expanding platform required clearer visibility and consistency

Prior to Akuity, Laurel deployed Kubernetes resources using Terraform and CircleCI. As the business expanded across several regions and services, the team wanted a deployment approach that provided clearer visibility into application states and a more predictable workflow for developers.

“Managing Kubernetes deployments through Terraform sometimes resulted in issues that were time-consuming to investigate.’ - Nat Welch, Engineering Manager, Infra & Security

Developers often lacked an easy way to understand what was deployed where, which made it harder to quickly interpret failures and move work forward with confidence

A lean infrastructure team needed a managed, scalable approach

With only two infrastructure engineers supporting dozens of developers, Laurel sought a solution that aligned with its preference for managed services and allowed the team to focus on platform improvements rather than maintaining deployment tooling.

The Solution

A managed, Kubernetes-native GitOps platform built for small teams and multi-region scale

Laurel selected Akuity as its GitOps platform due to its managed service model, Kubernetes-native design, and the expertise of the creators of Argo CD.

“Since we were a small team, the less we have to host, the better.” — Engineering Manager, Infra & Security

The team chose Akuity for its:

Trusted expertise from the creators of Argo CD
A managed control plane that eliminates operational burden
Strong community sentiment and active development
A startup partner mindset, allowing Laurel to collaborate closely with Akuity
Predictable scalability without worrying about the complexities of running Argo themselves

“The fact that Akuity has the creators of Argo was a big deal. We like partnering with teams where we can grow over time.” - Engineering Manager at Laurel, Infra & Security

Quick to adopt, easy to scale

Laurel implemented Akuity in under a week, including SSO configuration, agent setup, and multi-region readiness. The Git-native deployment workflow was immediately intuitive: commit a version update, push the change, and observe rollouts across clusters in real time.

As Laurel expanded into additional regions, Akuity’s agent-based model ensured consistent performance and removed the need for cross-cluster connectivity or elevated permissions.

Migration Experience

Laurel’s platform engineering team brought Akuity online and then migrated services gradually as part of its internal roadmap. As each service moved into Argo CD, developers gained clearer visibility into rollout progress and application health.

To support adoption, Laurel’s engineering team held periodic internal demos highlighting Argo’s real-time synchronization and health indicators. The response was consistently positive:

“Once teams saw their services in Argo, they were genuinely impressed. They could finally see how the system worked and where changes were rolling out.” - Engineering Manager at Laurel, Infra & Security

Akuity’s managed control plane enabled Laurel to adopt a simple, predictable GitOps process with consistent visibility across regions.

The Result

Higher deployment velocity

Laurel’s deployment volume grew from an initial target of ~600 deployments per month to thousands (and often tens of thousands) of deployments per month, driven by a more intuitive workflow and increased developer confidence.

“People feel more confident in the tooling, so they deploy more.”

Clear visibility and faster troubleshooting

Developers now understand rollout status and application health at a glance. This transparency accelerates debugging and helps teams make decisions more quickly across multiple environments.

Greater developer autonomy

Teams can independently view logs, check rollout progress, and verify service health without involving the infrastructure team, supporting faster delivery and smoother incident response.

Effortless multi-region scale

Adding new regions and clusters is seamless with Akuity.

“Adding a new cluster is basically a no-op. We install the Akuity agent and we’re done.” - Engineering Manager at Laurel, Infra & Security

Reduced operational overhead

Akuity’s managed model enables Laurel’s infrastructure team to focus on higher-value initiatives, such as expanding into new regions and enhancing platform reliability, rather than maintaining deployment tooling.

Reduced operational overhead

Confidence Up, Complexity Down

By adopting Akuity’s managed Argo CD platform, Laurel strengthened deployment reliability, improved developer experience, and introduced a consistent, scalable GitOps workflow across all environments. With predictable rollouts and an intuitive deployment model, Laurel can continue expanding globally and launching new services, all without adding infrastructure complexity or slowing engineering teams down.