Case Study

Accelerating Innovation: Enabling Fast, Consistent Deployments

Before Control Plane, our releases were unpredictable, sometimes taking over an hour. Now, our deployments happen in a matter of minutes, drastically improving our engineering efficiency.

Pete Torres, SVP of Engineering

Institution Snapshot

Institution

Linker Finance

Location

Pasadena, CA

Industry

FinTech

Community banks are the backbone of small businesses, providing 60% of SMB loans and 80% of agricultural loans. While they're thriving and expanding their reach, many still struggle to streamline operations, eliminate paperwork, and reduce manual back-office work. Linker Finance helps community banks grow deposits securely online, simplify business onboarding, and launch modern financial products all without requiring a core conversion. As a fast-moving fintech, Linker's engineering team prioritizes security, speed, agility, and scalability, ensuring that infrastructure supports momentum rather than slowing it down.

Challenges Leading to Control Plane Exploration: Before adopting Control Plane, Linker Finance was managing infrastructure manually through the AWS console. This created bottlenecks in their deployment process and, as a result, deployment times were long, inconsistent, and often unpredictable. Linker Finance wanted to give the team more autonomy to deploy environments securely, improve efficiency, replicate environments across regions, and scale the capabilities of the DevOps Engineering team.

Key Details

Reduced Deployment Time
Greater Developer Autonomy
Structured, Consistent Release Practices
Collaborative Partnership

Problem

When Growth Meets Deployment Friction

Unpredictable & Lengthy Deployment Times

Before adopting Control Plane, Linker Finance had a functional AWS setup in place, but deployment times varied and could occasionally stretch longer than desired. The team saw an opportunity to bring more consistency and speed to this process, aiming to better support their growing release cadence.

Reducing Infrastructure Bottlenecks

Infrastructure management was handled by a core group of engineers, which ensured stability but also meant deployments and updates were funneled through a limited set of hands. With ambitions to scale and empower more of the engineering team, Linker looked to streamline access and distribute operational ownership more effectively.

Enhancing Structure and Observability

Linker was already clear on how they wanted to manage their cloud environment, but recognized that introducing a more structured DevOps approach could help improve repeatability, visibility, and long-term scalability, all without disrupting their existing AWS setup.

Deployment was a black box, only a few people had access, and everything had to go through them. It slowed us down and made the process hard to predict.

Pete Torres

SVP of Engineering

Solution

Scale, Speed, and Consistency

Faster, More Predictable Deployments

With Control Plane, Linker Finance streamlined their deployment process, achieving faster turnaround times and greater consistency across environments. The automation and structure introduced by Control Plane helped reduce operational friction and made it easier to support iterative development and time-sensitive launches.

Developer Autonomy & DevOps Adoption

Control Plane made infrastructure more accessible across the engineering team, reducing dependencies on a single group. This shift enabled broader participation in deployment workflows and fostered a more DevOps-aligned approach to delivery and infrastructure management.

Best Practices & Observability, Baked In

Control Plane introduced built-in tooling such as Kubernetes integration, structured release workflows, and improved observability. These capabilities helped the team reinforce scalable practices around multi-tenancy, infrastructure management, and performance, setting a solid foundation for growth and continuity.

As we were exploring services and cloud providers, we wanted to adopt a solution that affords us the ability to scale geographically with our users. Additionally, we wanted to ensure we could move between cloud providers with ease. Control Plane provides that flexibility, and doesn't lock us into a cloud provider vendor.

Pete Torres

SVP of Engineering

Summary

Linker Finance partnered with Control Plane to remove infrastructure friction and empower developers. Now, with faster deployments and better processes in place, their engineering team is free to focus on what they do best: building and improving the product.

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