About RTTR
RTTR and Lean Customs are partner start-ups aiming to disrupt the logistics industry by offering fast, affordable, and trackable customs declarations. Since their launch, they have collectively cleared over €3 billion in value, quickly establishing themselves as trend-setters in digital customs services.
With an API-first approach that encompasses all facets of customs services—communication, customs brokerage, contracting, finance, and compliance—they have built a seamless digital infrastructure. This allows their clients to access all services through a single API, giving them a significant competitive edge in the logistics industry by delivering both innovative technology and reliable customs services.
The challenge
With rapid growth, RTTR faced the dual challenge of maintaining the speed of development while ensuring their infrastructure was stable enough to meet the demands of existing clients. Too much time was spent maintaining production, leaving limited resources for feature development and delivering business value.
As RTTR continued to grow, these key challenges arose:
- Developers needed a more efficient and secure way to manage their production environment.
- The existing infrastructure required frequent manual intervention, slowing down deployments and increasing operational risk.
- Ensuring secure access to internal resources for their remote-first team became critical to protect sensitive information.
- Production changes required automated testing to ensure stability.
- Their system needed the ability to dynamically scale based on the volume of messages in a queue, to handle fluctuating workloads without manual intervention.
The solution
To address RTTR’s scaling and operational challenges, we implemented a robust infrastructure using Kubernetes on Google Cloud. This allowed RTTR to achieve seamless scalability, dynamically adjusting their application’s resources to meet demand. By integrating KEDA (Kubernetes Event-Driven Autoscaling), we ensured the system could automatically scale up or down based on the number of messages in a queue, maintaining optimal performance without manual intervention.
To further strengthen security, we deployed Tailscale, enabling secure, encrypted communications between RTTR’s developers and internal resources. This solution ensured that RTTR’s remote-first team could securely access the infrastructure from any location, while maintaining strict access controls to protect sensitive data.
We also implemented GitOps, giving RTTR’s developers full control over their applications in production. This approach allowed them to deploy, manage, and monitor their systems confidently and autonomously, improving deployment speed and reducing operational bottlenecks. With GitOps, every change to the infrastructure was tracked, making the entire process reliable, transparent, and version-controlled.
The biggest benefit is that every developer now feels fully responsible for the application from A to Z, without putting unnecessary strain on me for releases.
Dirk Jonker, CTO
Finally, we implemented a DevOps pipeline using Argo Workflows with preemptible instances for cost-effective, automated testing. This streamlined the testing process, providing immediate feedback and enabling faster, more reliable production deployments.
Our impact
Initial Setup | With PolitePixels |
|---|---|
| Scaling the application took a lot of manual effort. | Automated scaling to match the exact load on the system. |
| Developers need to nudge the CTO to make changes on production. | Developers have full control over their production environments. |
| No automated testing of application. | Enforced application testing to ensure production readiness. |
| Too much time spent on infrastructure maintenance, slowing development progress. | Freed-up development time, allowing teams to focus on feature development and business growth. |
Key results
Automated scalability with KEDA, ensuring the application dynamically adjusts to workloads without manual intervention.
Increased operational security, with Tailscale providing secure access to internal systems for remote teams.
Significant reduction in time spent on infrastructure management, allowing RTTR to focus more on feature development and delivering business value.
Improved system stability, reducing downtime and ensuring the infrastructure scales effortlessly to handle spikes in demand.
My favourite thing about working with PolitePixels is their sense of humour and relaxed attitude.
Dirk Jonker, CTO
