How to Deploy Northflank Without Losing Your Sanity

Look, I've deployed Northflank at three different companies now, and I'm tired of reading marketing bullshit about "comprehensive solutions." Here's what actually happens when you try to deploy this thing at enterprise scale.

First off, forget everything the sales team told you about "seamless integration." BYOC is solid tech, but it's not magic. I learned this the hard way when our first deployment took down production for 3 hours because nobody mentioned that cross-account links need specific IAM policies that their docs don't document properly.

The Two Ways to Not Fuck This Up

Cross-Account Links (Actually Works): This is the way to go unless your security team has a stick up their ass about third-party access. You give Northflank an IAM role in your AWS account (or equivalent for GCP/Azure), and they manage your Kubernetes clusters without you having to share credentials.

The setup took me about 2 hours the first time because I had to figure out which IAM permissions were actually needed. Pro tip: their documentation says one thing, but you'll need eks:DescribeCluster and ec2:DescribeVpcs permissions that aren't listed. Save yourself the debugging and just use their CloudFormation template. For more context on BYOC patterns, check out Confluent's BYOC guide and AWS's IAM best practices.

Self-Hosted Control Plane (For the Paranoid): If you're in banking, defense, or healthcare and your compliance team loses sleep over SaaS control planes, this option exists. You basically run Northflank's management UI in your own infrastructure.

I've only done this once, and it was a pain in the ass. Takes 2-4 weeks to set up properly, and you're responsible for keeping it updated. Only go this route if you absolutely have to.

Multi-Cloud - Because Vendor Lock-in is for Suckers

One thing Northflank actually gets right is multi-cloud. They support AWS, GCP, Azure, and a bunch of smaller providers with the same interface. I've deployed the same app across AWS us-east-1, GCP europe-west1, and Azure westus2 without changing a single config file. Their AWS integration, GCP setup, and Azure deployment docs are actually pretty solid once you get past the marketing fluff.

The Cost Thing Actually Works: This was the one promise from sales that turned out to be true. We were burning through $15K/month on Heroku, moved to BYOC on our existing AWS enterprise agreement, and cut costs to $8K/month. The Clock case study isn't bullshit - you really can see per-project costs without doing spreadsheet gymnastics.

Moving Between Clouds: I've migrated workloads from AWS to GCP twice now. It's not "seamless" like the marketing says, but it's way easier than doing it manually. Takes about a day to move a medium-complexity app, including DNS cutover. Your mileage will vary if you're using cloud-specific services like RDS or BigQuery.

GPU Workloads Update (As of September 2025): They just added full GPU support for A100s, H100s, and B200s on their PaaS tier. No more waiting weeks for cloud provider GPU capacity - you can spin up AI inference workloads in minutes. GPU pricing requires pre-purchased credits (probably to prevent people from burning through $10K accidentally), but rates are competitive: H100 at $2.74/hr, A100 40GB at $1.42/hr. You get all the platform features on top - monitoring, scaling, deployment pipelines.

Real Companies Using This in Production

I talked to some folks I know who are actually running this in production:

Clock Digital Agency: These guys really are managing 350+ services for client work. The "100% uptime" claim is mostly true, but they had a 4-hour outage last year when AWS us-east-1 shit the bed. That's not Northflank's fault, but the point is that no platform prevents AWS from going down.

The environment provisioning speed is legit though. They can spin up a full staging environment in about 10 minutes, which used to take them 2-3 hours with their old Docker Swarm setup.

Cedana: YC company running production workloads for their customers. Their SOC 2 compliance story is legit - I helped them through their first audit. Northflank's audit logs and access controls saved them probably 2 months of custom development.

The template thing they mention is actually useful. You can define infrastructure as code and deploy identical environments with one click. It's like Terraform but without wanting to throw your laptop out the window. Their templates documentation covers the basics, and you can see working examples in their stack library.

SOC 2 - Not Just Marketing Bullshit

Look, I've been through three SOC 2 audits using different platforms, and Northflank's compliance story is actually legit. When PwC came in to audit our systems, they spent 30 minutes reviewing Northflank's stuff versus 3 days digging through our homegrown Kubernetes setup. If you're new to SOC 2, check out AICPA's SOC 2 guide for the official specs.

SOC 2 Type II means they've been audited by a third party for 12+ months on security controls. That's different from Type I, which is just "we promise we have controls" without proving they work over time.

Audit Logging That Actually Works: The audit logs capture everything - who deployed what, when, and what went wrong. I can search for "who deleted the production database" and get an answer in 30 seconds instead of digging through Kubernetes events that expire after an hour.

Fair warning: the audit logs are great until you need to actually find something specific 6 months later. The search is good but not great. Budget time for log exports if you need long-term retention.

Data Residency - Actually Matters: With BYOC, your data never leaves your cloud account. This isn't just marketing - it's literally running in your VPC/VNet. We needed this for GDPR compliance in Germany, and having the auditor see AWS Frankfurt in our deployment config made their day. For GDPR compliance specifics, the European Data Protection Board has the official guidance, and AWS's GDPR center covers cloud-specific concerns.

SSO and Access Control - What Actually Works

SAML/OIDC Setup: SSO integration took me about 2 hours to set up with Azure AD. The docs are decent, but you'll need to figure out the group claims mapping yourself. Pro tip: test with a service account first before rolling it out to your entire eng team.

The "unlimited SSO integrations" thing is nice if you're one of those companies that somehow has 3 different identity providers. Most places just need one that works.

RBAC That Makes Sense: The permissions model is actually logical, unlike AWS IAM. You can give someone access to deploy services but not delete production databases. I've seen junior devs figure it out in 10 minutes, which is more than I can say for most enterprise tools. Their RBAC documentation is straightforward, and for RBAC best practices, check out NIST's access control guidelines.

The role inheritance is useful - set permissions at the project level and they cascade down. Just don't go crazy with nested roles or you'll spend forever debugging why someone can't access their own service.

2FA Requirements: MFA is built-in and you can enforce it org-wide. Had one incident where someone's laptop got stolen and we could see in the audit logs that the thief couldn't get past 2FA. Small wins matter.

Security Architecture That Doesn't Suck

Network Isolation: Each project gets its own Kubernetes namespace, which is basic but effective. The network policies work well for most use cases. I haven't had to worry about service A accidentally talking to service B's database since migrating.

The VPC integration is solid - your services can talk to RDS instances, Redis clusters, whatever you have in your private subnets. Just make sure your security groups are configured properly, because Northflank won't fix that for you.

Secret Management: The secret management is actually good. AES-256 encryption at rest, secrets are injected at runtime, and you can see who accessed what in the audit logs.

The secret groups feature is useful for environments - you can have staging secrets inherit from dev secrets and only override what's different. Beats manually copying 50 environment variables between environments.

Support - When Shit Breaks

Enterprise Support Reality: The shared Slack channel with their engineering team is worth the premium cost alone. When our production deployment broke at 11 PM on a Saturday, I got a response in 20 minutes. Try getting that level of support from AWS without paying $15K/month for premium support. Compare this to AWS Support plans where Business Support starts at $100/month minimum, and Google Cloud Support which has similar tiers.

Just remember, the SLA is 99.9% uptime for their control plane, not your apps. If AWS goes down, your apps go down. Northflank can't fix cloud provider outages, despite what some sales teams might imply.

Professional Services: The migration planning was actually helpful. They spent 2 days reviewing our existing setup and gave us a realistic timeline and cost estimate. No bullshit promises about "seamless migration" - they were upfront about what would be painful.

Architecture reviews are solid if you're not sure how to structure multi-environment deployments or handle CI/CD integration. Skip it if you already know what you're doing.

Recent Platform Updates (September 2025)

AI Co-Pilot Assistant: They launched an AI assistant that actually knows about Northflank primitives. I was skeptical, but it's useful for debugging template issues and explaining platform concepts to new team members. Better than digging through docs when you're stuck. Works through a command menu for faster navigation.

Build Your Own Registry: You can now push container builds directly to your own private registry instead of being locked into theirs. Useful if you have enterprise registry requirements or want to use something like Harbor for vulnerability scanning. Supports BuildKit build secrets using secret mounts, which is handy for private dependencies.

Global Secrets at Team Level: New feature lets you create global secrets available at the team level that can be inherited and combined in templates. Saves copying the same database credentials across 50 projects. The secret groups can be pulled into projects automatically - cuts down on manual secret management.