How Upwork's Lifted runs production workloads inside their own VPC with Northflank

Lifted, Upwork's enterprise subsidiary for managing contingent workforce, leverages Northflank's developer platform for its deployment operations, prioritizing a Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC) model for enhanced security and compliance. Originally a customer of Bubty, which was acquired by Upwork, Lifted chose Northflank for its ability to simplify Kubernetes-based infrastructure management without hiding it, offering features like unlimited vanity domains and seamless GCP-to-AWS migration. The platform enables Lifted's engineering team to independently handle deployments, autoscale services, and manage secrets, all while maintaining compliance through centralized monitoring and audit control. Northflank's self-service model empowers application engineers to deploy and scale services without infra team intervention, ensuring efficient and autonomous operations. This setup supports Lifted's business continuity and compliance needs, allowing seamless collaboration between Lifted's application, support, and infrastructure teams while preparing for future expansions involving external add-ons and enhanced database capabilities.