From Infra Chaos to 3-Click Deploys: How Syment Saved €120K in DevOps with Qovery

Managing Kubernetes at scale introduces complexity that most organizations underestimate. While it offers flexibility and control, Kubernetes demands constant maintenance, deep expertise, and strict compliance. These burdens are especially difficult for lean teams. This case study shows how Syment, a French SaaS company, overcame infrastructure sprawl and operational pressure with Qovery, achieving fully automated, zero-downtime deployments that support high-stakes customer sessions with confidence.

To understand the impact Qovery had for Syment, it’s important to first understand the operational hurdles they faced managing Kubernetes at scale.

"Qovery gave us the power of Kubernetes without the complexity. Our team can now deploy in three clicks, even during a live client general assembly meeting. We’ve reduced downtime, boosted our agility, and no longer worry about managing infrastructure." Florent Blaison, Co-founder & CTO at Syment

#The Problem

Kubernetes upgrades are a constant requirement that drain engineering resources. Teams must validate Helm chart compatibility, redeploy services, and verify functionality across environments before rolling out to production. These upgrades often consume days of work and delay product development.

On top of that, cloud providers like Amazon EKS charge premium rates for outdated clusters. For example, extended support versions cost six times more than standard ones. This pricing pressure forces upgrades but adds even more load to already stretched teams.

As teams expand their Kubernetes footprint, operational overhead compounds in ways that strain resources and stall momentum. These challenges often emerge subtly but escalate rapidly, particularly for organizations managing multiple clusters or multi-environment workflows:

• Developer Productivity Drain
  Engineers increasingly divert time to troubleshoot infrastructure fires—such as Helm chart conflicts or node failures—instead of building features. A single misconfigured ingress controller or PersistentVolumeClaim (PVC) can consume days of debugging, delaying releases and demoralizing teams.
• Environment Sprawl
  Siloed configurations across development, staging, and production clusters create inconsistencies. Teams encounter "works on my machine" failures during deployments, while CI/CD pipelines slow due to manual environment reconciliation. Version drift between clusters (e.g., NGINX 1.25 in dev vs. 1.23 in prod) introduces unpredictable behavior.
• Security Debt Accumulation
  Manual patching cycles leave clusters exposed to critical vulnerabilities like CVE-2025-1974 (arbitrary code execution via ingress-nginx). Overdue certificate renewals, unmonitored service accounts, and unpatched CVEs in third-party operators (e.g., Istio, cert-manager) heighten breach risks and audit failures.
• Cost Unpredictability
  Overprovisioned node pools, orphaned PersistentVolumes, and unoptimized autoscaling rules inflate cloud bills by 20–40%. Teams lack granular visibility into spend per namespace or workload. This makes it impossible to right-size resources without manual, error-prone audits.
• Toolchain Fragmentation
  Disjointed solutions for logging (Loki), monitoring (Prometheus), and ingress (Nginx) force teams to juggle incompatible dashboards and APIs. Managing diverse tools for logging, monitoring, and ingress often leads to fragmented dashboards and APIs. Additionally, maintaining specialized configurations for stateful applications like Redis or PostgreSQL increases operational complexity.

These common Kubernetes pitfalls weren’t just theoretical for Syment—they were lived realities that began to interfere with their core business. 

#Syment’s Challenge

With a small engineering team of six and no dedicated DevOps role, Syment struggled to maintain their EC2 and Docker Compose infrastructure as their platform scaled. Live customer sessions demanded high reliability and minimal downtime, but infrastructure complexity kept getting in the way.

• Maintenance efforts drained valuable developer time
• Deployments risked downtime during important meetings
• The team lacked Kubernetes expertise
• Cloud costs were rising unpredictably

Facing these limitations, Syment needed a solution that could deliver both control and simplicity. That’s where Qovery came in. 

#The Qovery Approach: Automated Kubernetes Governance at Scale

Managing Kubernetes doesn't have to be a burden. Qovery brings structure, automation, and peace of mind to what’s often a tangled mess of upgrades, patching, and compliance overhead. Here’s how:

Smart, Safe Cluster Upgrades

Upgrading Kubernetes and keeping system components up-to-date can easily eat up weeks of engineering time. Qovery automates this process with built-in rollout strategies, staging environments for validation, and rollback protection. Compatibility checks using tools like Kubent ensure things don’t break after an update.

Security That Doesn't Slow You Down

Security shouldn’t be something you bolt on at the last minute. Qovery tracks critical vulnerabilities and pushes fixes automatically across clusters. All infrastructure is set up using Terraform, so environments stay consistent and secure without surprise configuration drift.

Cloud-Agnostic, Cost-Aware Deployments

Whether you're on AWS, GCP, or Scaleway, Qovery standardizes how apps are deployed across clouds. It also helps save on costs by pausing unused environments and integrating with tools like Karpenter to make better use of cloud resources.

Developer Access With Guardrails

Qovery gives developers access to Kubernetes through CLI, Terraform, and built-in features like shell and port-forwarding, all without giving away the keys. 

The results speak for themselves. By shifting to Qovery, Syment unlocked major improvements in reliability, developer velocity, and cost efficiency.

#Syment’s Results

Since adopting Qovery, Syment has seen dramatic improvements in delivery speed, reliability, and team efficiency:

• Chart updates and management: Managing Helm chart updates and Kubernetes upgrades used to be time-consuming and required specialized expertise. With Qovery handling this process, Syment avoided the need to hire a dedicated DevOps engineer, saving an estimated €120,000–€140,000 annually.
• Time saved on Kubernetes maintenance: The team doesn’t need to spend significant time manually managing infrastructure on EC2 with Docker Compose as Qovery handles it. With Qovery, automating Kubernetes operations, infrastructure maintenance now takes less than 2 hours per month, mostly for monitoring rather than hands-on work.
• Modernization & upskilling: By abstracting away the complexity of Kubernetes, Qovery enabled Syment’s team, including developers with little to no DevOps experience, to deploy to production in under 30 minutes, independently. This streamlined workflow has accelerated onboarding and fostered cross-functional capability across the team.
• Zero-downtime deployments: Before Qovery, deployments had to be scheduled during off-hours due to 2–3 seconds of downtime. Today, Syment supports live deployments, even during client AGMs, without interruption, increasing agility and client confidence.
• Preview environments for all PRs: Thanks to automated preview environments, Syment now runs an average of 5+ ephemeral environments per month, boosting testing speed and front-end collaboration. 

For teams considering a similar transformation, here are answers to some of the most frequent questions about how Qovery works. 

#Conclusion: Kubernetes Complexity Is Optional

With Qovery, teams like Syment demonstrate that you can achieve the benefits of Kubernetes–reliability, scalability, portability–without the burdens of managing it. Whether you’re dealing with high-stakes customer interactions or simply want to ship features faster, Qovery lets you focus on what matters: building and delivering great software. Try Qovery today!

#FAQ: What Teams Often Ask

1. How does Qovery handle Kubernetes upgrades without downtime?

Upgrades are rolled out in phases—first to internal staging clusters, then to customer staging, and finally to production. Tools like Kubent detect deprecated APIs, and validation tests confirm compatibility with the target Kubernetes version. Qovery officially supports the latest and previous (n–1) versions.

2. How are security vulnerabilities like CVEs managed?

Qovery monitors for known CVEs in real time. When an issue arises, patches are backported and rolled out through automated pipelines. Infrastructure is deployed using Terraform to ensure immutability, and encryption and access logging are enabled by default.

3. What autoscaling strategies are supported?

Qovery integrates Karpenter to optimize node provisioning, especially with spot instances. Vertical Pod Autoscaler is used for system components, and Horizontal Pod Autoscaler manages scaling for user applications.

4. How does Qovery reduce cloud costs?

Qovery allows environments and clusters to auto-pause during inactivity. This is particularly effective for reducing spend in non-production environments. Real-time cost dashboards are not available yet but are being considered.

5. What self-service capabilities are available for developers?

Developers can use the Qovery CLI and Terraform provider to manage infrastructure. Shell access and port-forwarding are also available, providing control without needing full admin rights.